What is contype UA?

[transistor]

Found these in my logs recently:

200.52.160.3 - - [06/Oct/2002:04:08:45 -0600] "GET /xxx/audio.html?id=abc HTTP/1.0" 200 4367 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt)"
200.52.160.3 - - [06/Oct/2002:04:08:58 -0600] "GET /xxx/ram/abc.ram?embed HTTP/1.0" 200 44 "-" "contype"

I believe that "contype" is not a robot/spider.
Apparently, it is the same user (same IP and same session).
The user first requests a page (audio.html) that contains a RealAudio file and then, the file is played back abc.ram?embed.

Is "contype" some kind of media player that handles RealAudio files? Or maybe, since it seems to be related to Digext (browse offline), some sort of "downloader companion"?

You might find a Perl CGI named "Contype", but they say it is NOT related to the "contype" user agent.

I feel tempted to ban it, but it only requested 2 files and I don't want to get legit users in trouble (except if this thing is not used for a good purpose).

[jeremy goodrich]

There are a lot of entries in Google for that useragent. For only two requests, I don't know if I would bother, but if it comes back / requests too many files, or disobeys robots.txt, I'd ban it.

[transistor]

I agree with you Jeremy, but still I want to know what is it.
As you noted, there are many entries for "contype" at Google, but no precise ID, if you ask me.
Thanks!

[bird]

Contype is a media addition to IE. On my site, most often it will fetch PDF files, but it also handles audio and video data. Another thing it seems to do is to check the format of the data before downloading, as it (or IE?) doesn't seem to trust the content-type information provided by the web server.

If you block contype, then many IE users won't be able to view your non-HTML content.

[transistor]

Great! Thank you very much Bird. :)