Apple Trailers solved – kind of

Let no man tell you that Apple isn’t evil. Apple is every bit as monopolistic and fucking-bastardly as Microsoft – and this Quicktime shenanegans is just the last part of a long saga. Remember when installing or updating Quicktime suddenly automagically meant also installing their crappy webbrowser Safari in windows? Yeah. Remember how Itunes, until enough of us complained, was riddled with DRM? Yeah.

Tried watching Apple Trailers on Linux?

Yeah.

It turns out, there’s really no technical reason why it doesn’t work. It’s not a problem with VLC/Totem/mplayer. It’s a problem with Apple being fucking assholes. They just don’t want anyone not using Quicktime to watch these trailers – even though they haven’t (despite the fact that OSX is partially UNIX-based) provided Linux users with said software. Apple Are Also Evil.

The reason it won’t work with VLC, mplayer or totem addons for Firefox is that Apple Trailers check the useragent to see what name and version the software you’re trying to use is. If it’s enything that’s not Quicktime, it won’t work.

The Solution

Fuck you Apple, of course there’s a solution. A hack, a workaround. Did you really think you could get away with this? Really? The one I found is here. In short:

1. Right click on any of the HD choices. I’m using this trailer as an example, and the 1080 version. Select “Copy Link Location”.

2. You should now have something like “http://movies.apple.com/movies/independent/doriangray/doriangray_1080p.mov”. You won’t be able to watch it. Just read on.

3. Open a new Terminal window.

4. Type “wget -U Quicktime/7.6.2 ” followed by the URL you copied. In my example, this gets me “wget -U Quicktime/7.6.2 http://movies.apple.com/movies/independent/doriangray/doriangray_1080p.mov”

5. This is IMPORTANT: Add a “h” before the last part of the above string. This gets me “wget -U Quicktime/7.6.2 http://movies.apple.com/movies/independent/doriangray/doriangray_h1080p.mov” (boldness of h added for clarification).

6. Press ENTER.

7. Your trailer should now download into the folder you were in when you ran the command.

I might write a quick Python hack to do this for me at some point. If I do, I’ll post it here.