you know the one... "things work". I'm hoping someone has video captured it. I've been recording on my PVR for 2 weeks now with no luck. So anyone have a REALLY good quality mpeg?

How about a QuickTime?

Better than the wmv file I had, thanks. How would I go about saving this though? Its being awkward on me by refusing to save!

Try right-clicking on the Click Here link on the left side of the pop-up and see if you can ``Save As'' or whatever. It's pretty trivial for me using MacOS X browsers, but they might have done something annoying to prevent that for the Windows users.

Nope, just says cannot open. I HAVE found a site that says if you phone honda, they will send you a dvd of it. I'm going to try that now and see what they say.

Ok, a DVD is being sent to me next week. Anyone else want it? Just phone a Honda Dealer!

If you're in the UK can order it on the web :-

http://www.honda.co.uk/brochure/orderCars.jsp?source=accord

I had to find a bunch of mirrors indirectly linked off of JWZ's weblog, then use GetRight to do multiple-source downloading from several of the mirrors at once before I was able to download it at a decent speed. What a lot of trouble to go to, just to watch a TV commercial.

After getting a MOV copy and an SWF copy, both of them are of a lower quality level than I would like, and their frame rate hitches a stutters instead of playing smoothly like other MOV files I've got.

I'd be curious to see a better-rez rip of the DVD copy.

Tony if you give me your address I'll mail you a copy of the DVD. Bear in mind it'll be PAL format. Probably play in the PC ok though. Or I can extract the video and make a high rez mpeg. Whatever you prefer

Thanks. Let me know when you get it and we'll work something out.

When I right clicked on the "Click Here" link, I then clicked on the "save target as" and it let me save the file. Pretty neat little clip that I don't remember ever seeing before.

I think that ad is great, except for when the wheels roll up the ramp. Other than that, it reminds me of when I was involved with Odyssey of the Mind back in grade school.

p.s. If anyone that can't d/l the file wants me to host it so you can get it, let me know.

Whats wrong with the wheels? There was a big article on it in our local paper - apparently they are weighted so they roll up the slope. The DVD has extras showing how its made I think. I'll know better when I get it next week.

Anyone else want a dvd?

Yes, that's correct, the wheels had weights in them and were carefully balanced with the weights at the very top. As soon as they were bumped slightly, they rolled. Same with the muffler. They wouldn't roll very far uphill like that, just enough to continue the chain reaction. This was talked about in one of the web articles I read about the commercial.

How would I go about saving this though?

I always watch quicktimes on the web, then go to my temp internet files, dig for the largest and rename it with a .mov extension... works everytime

Hey just looked at that ad on the beam.tv website.

Very clever.

It reminded me of a similar bit of TV I saw once on the BBC (2?) in the UK in 1989 which had something similar.
That one lasted over 10 minutes and had just about every Rube Goldburg/Heath Robinson invention imaginable [many more than the Honda ad showed], which no commentary.
The only sounds were the sounds made by the inventions as they worked.

The segment started with a car tyre rolling from left to right, and ended the same way.

Wish I had a copy of that as it was really clever in the way they did stuff.

I always watch quicktimes on the web, then go to my temp internet files, dig for the largest and rename it with a .mov extension... works everytime

Or get Quicktime Pro, which allows you to save the file right from the user interface...

It reminded me of a similar bit of TV I saw once on the BBC (2?) in the UK in 1989 which had something similar. That one lasted over 10 minutes

It was most likely The Way Things Go.

>Need the Honda advert

Okay, way too cool that -- I was curious enough about this to sit down and "fix" Redhat-9 to play multimedia stuff properly (it's pretty crippled out of the "box"). Thanks!