redirect a link to a direct file

November 16, 2005 12:53 PM

Help! I got boing-boinged yesterday and have since gone way over my bandwidth limit. The offending item was a direct link to a .mov file, which I have just posted on revver, but I don't know if there is any way to redirect a direct link to a file. Any suggestions?

Should I just take down the file and craft a specific 404 file? how do i do that?

posted by garethspor to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Are you on a Windows or Unix platform? You could use an .htaccess file w/ a mod_rewrite rule to redirect the traffic if you're hosted on Apache.
posted by xmutex at 1:02 PM on November 16, 2005

If your hosting provider can parse .htaccess files (most do), you can put this line in an .htaccess file in the directory with the file in question:

Redirect movie.mov http://www.newsite.com/movie.mov
posted by zsazsa at 1:04 PM on November 16, 2005

Off the top of my head, rewrite syntax would be (this in an .htaccess file in the same folder of the MOV or in the site root):

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule filename.mov$ http://www.someotherurl.com
posted by xmutex at 1:04 PM on November 16, 2005

doh :)
posted by xmutex at 1:05 PM on November 16, 2005

Note that xmutex's option may work if mine doesn't; each requires different modules which may or may not be loaded in Apache. Mine requires mod_alias, xmutex's requires mod_rewrite.
posted by zsazsa at 1:09 PM on November 16, 2005

11 minutes, thanks AxeMe!
posted by garethspor at 1:18 PM on November 16, 2005

That's a great video. What a lot of work! My brain would never be able to handle the logistics of all that masking...
posted by fire&wings at 1:24 PM on November 16, 2005

that masking tape was expensive too.
posted by garethspor at 2:06 PM on November 16, 2005

Nice video. I was one of the people maxing out your bandwidth yesterday.

How does Revver work, by the way? There are no ads on the pages...
posted by AmbroseChapel at 2:47 PM on November 16, 2005

The last frame of the movie is a clickable ad. It's more obvious when it's a shorter video.
posted by smackfu at 2:59 PM on November 16, 2005