David said:
Hi
Does anyone know where Firefox has it's temporary internet files folder. I
just watched a video on-line, so I suppose it will be cached somewhere - I
would like to save it in My Documents so I can look at it later without the
big wait for it online - I'm on 56K dial up modem.
If the video is served as true streaming media from a media server,
such as is done on many big media sites and audio/video broadcasts, the
media file will not be cached at all, except for a small buffer cache
that keeps being updated as the video plays. Think of what would happen
if you had a streaming radio or video broadcast on all day on
broadband, and everything was cached. You would soon run out HD space
to store the many GB cach file.
If the media file is downloaded by "progressive download", which you
use if you do not have a special streaming media server, the whole
media file is cached, and, if coded properly, the playback then starts
and "streams" while the media file is still downloading. In this case
the media file should be in a cache somewhere after playback is
completed. One complication is that some media players can also cache
things in their own special cache. For example if you are using a
recent Real player and you write some code for it in SMIL, if you call
some media using "chtml://blah" instead of "html/blah", the media is
cached in Real's special cache. This is sometimes useful in situations
where the same media file might be soon needed again. However the
memory available for the Real player cache is much more limited than
that for the general cache used with most browsers.
Somewhat different code is used to call a streaming server stream and a
media file stored on an ordinary html server. However, many of the big
media sites that use a streaming server have so much code scattered on
many linked files, that it can take considerable time to find exactly
how they are linking to the media. And if they are using php, you may
not be able to see some of the critical code at all.
