Downloading large files: The elusive eternal dream
Posted on December 11th, 2009
Christian Sandvig tried downloading a file of a mere 1.7 gigabytes — as he points out, the Blu-Ray version of “Ice Age 2″ is 22gb, and that’s just an animated movie about frozen squirrels or something, so imagine how big a movie with complex ideas might be!* — and found that IE, Chrome, Firefox and DownloadThemAll FAILed, in their own ways.
That accords with my own experience. Even if the browser-based download completes, it’s likely to result in a corrupt file. Sigh.
*That was a joke
I think this is just one of those things that isn’t done well by http. I’ve just started my annual love affair with EasyNews [screeners for Oscar movies!] and they suggest using a downloader, like a browser helper so that you can start and stop downloads and not have to do this sort of thing in a FAIL-y way all the time. I’ve just started looking into good Mac-based ways to do this.
Wow, I think It’s impossible to successfully download such a large movie file with browsers, at least not now.