Site seems to expire based on Referrer. How to bypass ?

Defenestration
04/11/2005 09:46 pm
I have a problem when downloading movie files from a website. When doing it manually, I only get one attempt to download the file, and if it fails, I have to reload the page before attempting to download the file again, in which case it will succeed.

So, a couple of questions so I can further my understanding of how some websites work -

1) Why/How does this kind of system work ? Is it based on the Referrer, which then expires ? In my tests I was using the Firefox web browser and set it to not allow cookies unless I had specifically allowed them for sites (which I had not for this particular site)

Why does it expire, and why does the download work again after a reload of the page ?

2) When I try to download the movie files with OE, I always get the error page instead of the movie file. How can I get the files to download with OE ?

I`m sure the answer to (1) holds the key.
Oleg Chernavin
04/12/2005 07:23 am
I think that the page adds a kind of a hash (session ID) value to the video file URL. You can load this URL only once and the server remembers it. Downloading the same URL the second time is rejected.

What if you would try to use AutoSave to load this kind of site?

Best regards,
Oleg Chernavin
MP Staff