Hello, I was trying to access the website http://tasvideos.org/ earlier this week and it seems my IP is banned or something. When I try to access any part of the site I get brought to: http://bisqwit.iki.fi/errors/error-403.php
I dont fall under any of those categories save permission to access the website, but last time I tried coming here (around a year ago) I had no problems and was able to download and watch any movie.
Sorry if this has been covered anywhere I couldnt find any topics in the search button, nor can I read the FAQ as I am also blocked from seeing that.
On a side note I gave the link to the site to my friends and they were all able to get in no problem.
If we can resolve this somehow it would be greatly appreciated, I love watching these movies =)
Your browser reports your user-agent as:
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; Media Center PC 5.0; InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Windows-Media-Player/10.00.00.3990)"
My server bans access by user-agents claiming to be "Windows-Media-Player"s, because those that do, usually are exactly that. People who try to play AVIs directly from my site*, instead of downloading them to disk and watching them from there. I cannot afford streaming video, so I have banned direct access by WMP.
Why does your browser claim that it is WMP? I have no idea, but changing that fact will improve your access.
*) Playing AVIs directly is bad because it usually incurs repeated downloads of the same sections of the file, wasting bandwidth that could be used to serve other clients.
Thank you for the quick reply Bisqwit, I looked into both WMP and Internet Explorers' tools and options and cant find anything on changing the status.
Im currently running windows Vista 64 bit with Internet Explorer and normal windows media player 10
The difference is that with certain types of files, when the URL is directly passed to WMP instead of being downloaded at first, WMP first downloads a small stripe (around 256 kB) of the file from beginning to identify it, then downloads it in pieces as the user plays the movie. If the user seeks back / forth in the movie, it stops the download and starts a new one from that new position.
The meaning of this is that it will download same data multiple times, wasting bandwidth.
I don't exactly remember which file types this behavior applied to -- might have been MP3, might have been WMV. I only remember that I banned it for exactly this reason. If the user is accessing the file using WMP, they're fundamentally doing it wrong, so therefore I'm blocking that access.
Now why does one's browser report as being a Windows Media Player when it is in fact not, is beyond me. Or perhaps it is WMP, because it has that "Windows Media Center" system integrated into it. Don't know.
What I'm wondering is: Where exactly at tasvideos.org are there direct AVI downloads (which would potentially cause the bandwidth problems)?
(Edit: And if the problem is indeed with AVI files, can't you add a rule to your ban that it's banned only if the requested file is an AVI file?)