How to download just initial parts of movies?

[bkemadu]

Downloading complete movies takes a lot of time for me. And i know it takes so much time for you all.
Rather than downloading full movie I tried to download just the inital part (mp4 files) and stopped the download process, but then when I tried to open mp4 file no success, it was broken.
So how can I download just some parts or the initial part of mp4 files without errors and open & play it successfully?

[mucowag]

Not possible. The only format I know is AVI where you can sometimes view the
first part of the movie on it's own, in some players, though not scroll though.
Other formats require the "terminator" before you can play them.
There are utilities that can repair "Broken files" with mixed success.

[cicciobuki]

Originally Posted by mucowag

Not possible.

Yes possible.

In Firefox here's what i do if i want to have a sneak peek at a video:


Go to the download folder, you will see 2 files, one with the video icon (0 bytes) and one .part file (with the kb of what you have downloaded so far.
Do NOT stop your download or both will disappear!

Such a filename will for example look like hot_clip.mpeg.part

You can right click that file and copy it (wherever you want, just DO NOT delete or do anything else to the original file), then rename the copied file by taking out the .part part, the blank file icon will change into a video icon file and it will be playable.

I use VLC and most of the time it works fine, unless the downloaded bit is too small, some .mkv files won't work either and of course it doesn't work for zipped files.




Edit: make sure Windows is set to display file extensions, otherwise this might not work.

[mucowag]

The browser is irrellevant, but yes you can rename part files, eg, an HJ split volume 001
can be renamed to the video format and is playable, with no scrolling, but an HJ split
volume 002 on it's own cannot be played, as the essential file information, will always
be in the volume 001.

As cicciobuki says, RAR and ZIP files need to be dowloaded in their entirety.

[acitore]

This one used to work, at least until recently:

https://www.clipconverter.cc/

Once you click on the video file format (MP4, AVI, etc), you can choose (from a longer video) the second you want your video to start and to finish.

Regards.

[fats]

Originally Posted by mucowag

As cicciobuki says, RAR and ZIP files need to be dowloaded in their entirety.

Arriving late to this discussion ...

Files can usually be extracted from a ZIP or RAR even when the archive isn't complete. There have been a number of times when I've downloaded the first part of a movie (including MP4!) in a ZIP or RAR file and extracted it and played it. I'm not a vid expert, so I don't know the details of where in the file the index/TOC is and so on, but (for instance) I have an incomplete MP4 here at the moment and it plays fine in VLC and I can even move around in it as long as I don't try to go past the premature EOF. (The situation, of course, was that the vid was in two parts on a file host and the first part was still available but the second had been deleted.)

And the archive thing itself is no big deal. The important point is to tell your extractor software, whatever it might be, to keep incomplete or broken files rather than deleting them. Deleting incompletes is the default behavior (and in some software maybe the only possible behavior), to try to save you from various bad things.

I use Macs and Mac OS (BSD-based), so this is no help for most of you, but for Mac OS the best GUI utility is (no, not Stuffit; that has been in extreme-suckage mode for many years) "The Unarchiver", which can handle many archive types and will give you the option, in an alert, of keeping an incomplete expansion. With command-line utilities, sometimes there's an option that you have to use explicitly; for instance, in Alexander Roshal's unrar (currently at version 5.61 and available via Macports) it's "-kb" for "keep broken".

Also, in the case of playing an incomplete movie file, depending on the file type I have occasionally seen VLC ask whether it should try to repair the index/TOC, and that seems like it might be useful, or worth a try anyway, but don't count on it.

[fats]

https://rapidgator.net/file/be7b3aaf...bd197ac7fab27c

The video is "ClubSeventeen - Bunny Baby - 1080p (Dec 10, 2015)" and the file name is "iak-clubseventeen-151210.mp4". That's part 1 of 2, in a 1-GB RAR file, and the incomplete H.264 1920x1080 MP4 file that I end up with is 999,999,848 bytes (out of 1.7 GB total) and plays OK in VLC and in QT Player until it falls off the cliff at 16:23 (end of part 1) out of 28:35 total.

P.S. Just for fun I started another download of the same file, then stopped it at about 25 megabytes and extracted the initial fragment of .mp4 file from the .rar, and that starts playing just fine also, going to 00:25 before expiring.