Call to the clever internet

[mrsbrown]

Rose had a lot of enjoyment watching Farmer Maurice's Old Hat on the abc website.

Then they changed the website and removed it. Because it was flash, I didn't know how to save it to my hard disk, so it seemed it was gone forever.

Today I took a look athe Wayback machine and I can get the flash animation for the loading screen, but I can't work out how to find the actual story.

Can anyone help?

The flash I'm getting is here http://web.archive.org/web/20080116130255/http://www.abc.net.au/children/play/stories/

btw, I had email contact with the abc at the time, and they were sympathetic, but wouldn't help - bastards!

Comments

[vonstrassburg.livejournal.com]

From the internals of the above URL (view->source), the flash file itself is http://web.archive.org/web/20050820024012/www.abc.net.au/children/play/stories/fmh.swf

You can just right click that link and "save link as ..." etc.

You should be able to load the swf file into your browser at any future time and it should play. Once the loading screen hits 99%, right click in the animation and turn off "Loop" and hit "Play". It still seems to suck things down from the web.archive.org site which may or may not be there, but without pulling the swf file apart there's not a lot I can figure out there.

Play.

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

Bloody hell, you're right! Neat trick, that.

[mrsbrown.livejournal.com]

That's a fabulous start, thanks.

Unfortunately, it's not working the way it should, and the embedded video telling the story isn't there either.

Is there something else we can do? Or is it time to give up?

[(Anonymous)]

Unless you know someone who can pull apart flash files and get at the internals of them (it is possible but I'm not sure how), then I don't think there's a lot that can be done at this stage.

There will be a link to the embedded video in the flash file, so you could find what URL it is by packet tracing (e.g. wireshark) the HTTP connections coming out of the flash file, but unfortunately that just means you'll find the URL of the video that isn't there. It's not going to make it magically appear, you'll just get more information about what is missing.

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

Try http://web.archive.org/web/20050820024012/www.abc.net.au/children/play/stories/fmh.swf

although when I had a go with wget it kept dying and restarting. 99%, 49%, 49%, 10%,... at which point I gave up. It's about 1.5MB.

Then you need a flash player...