How to download HD Trailers from Apple.com

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How to download HD Trailers from Apple.com

So Quicktime sucks and is a horrible video player. That’s why there’s VLC and Media Player Classic with Quicktime Alternative. However, HD trailers on Apple.com forces you to use Quicktime to watch the HD versions. However, the decoding of the video is so poorly done, I can’t even watch 480p through Quicktime.

So a year back or so, I decided to figure out a way to download these High Definition trailers so I can watch them through VLC or MPC. I believe with VLC, you don’t need the QT alternative codec, but with MPC or WMP, you do. Anyway, if you go to an HD trailer page, e.g. Apple - Trailers - Breach- HD, you’ll usually see 3 buttons: 480p, 720p, and 1080p. My machine’s not fast enough to decode their 1080p, so I always opt for the 720p version. Trailers are usually a couple hundred megs, depending on how long it is. When I showed Derek this trick, he noticed that even though trailers said 1080p, they were hardly ever 1920×1080, usually something a bit smaller.

Anyway, once you’re on an HD trailer page:

1. Go to view source (CTRL+U in Firefox)
2. Search for 720p or 1080p (or 480p if you want) and it’s the 2nd hit you want.
3. You’ll find something close to this:
   QT_WriteOBJECT_XHTML(’http://movies.apple.com/trailers/images/hd_btn2_720p.mov’, ‘67′, ‘24′, ‘’, ‘bgcolor’, ‘FFFFFF’, ‘controller’, ‘false’, ‘href’, ‘http://images.apple.com/movies/universal/breach/breach-tlr1_720p.mov‘, ‘target’, ‘QuickTimePlayer’);
4. The 1st hit (i.e. hd_btn2_720p.mov) is just the image of the button. The 2nd hit (i.e. breach-tlr1_720p.mov) is actually a file that points to where the real trailer is ‘hidden’.
5. Take the 2nd URL and add an h between the _ and the resolution:
   From: http://images.apple.com/movies/universal/breach/breach-tlr1_720p.mov
   To: http://images.apple.com/movies/universal/breach/breach-tlr1_h720p.mov
   For 1080p, it would be:
   http://images.apple.com/movies/universal/breach/breach-tlr1_h1080p.mov
6. Next you can enter that URL into your browser and save it when it finishes downloading or whatever. I usually just use wget which came with Cygwin