well the apple trailer site is actually a pretty nice resource for watching new trailers… up until a few weeks ago!
apple has been so nice to start blocking trailer play for users that do not have quicktime installed, so everybody on linux has been locked out of watching trailers directly on the site.
the good thing though is that there’s always a solution (and in this case it’s pretty simple) to this kind of nonsense!
on most apple trailer pages you see the size button for the trailers on the right side… if you copy the url for let’s say the medium video you should get something like this:
http://movies.apple.com/movies/independent/ihopetheyservebeerinhell/ihopetheyservebeerinhell_h.480.mov?width=480&height=204 |
so to watch this video just open a shell and use mplayer.
- first we need a user agent to trick apple into serving us the movie file. after some research i found that
'QuickTime/7.6.2 (qtver=7.6.2;os=Windows NT 5.1Service Pack 3)'
works nicely.
- second we need to strip the size parameters from the url which would result in
http://movies.apple.com/movies/independent/ihopetheyservebeerinhell/ihopetheyservebeerinhell_h.480.mov
- third since we are streaming the movie let’s add a little buffer so mplayer can seamlessly play the file. in my example i chose 2048
so if we put this all together… the command would be
mplayer -cache 2048 -user-agent 'QuickTime/7.6.2 (qtver=7.6.2;os=Windows NT 5.1Service Pack 3)' http://movies.apple.com/movies/independent/ihopetheyservebeerinhell/ihopetheyservebeerinhell_h.480.mov |
and there we go, watching the trailers again…
[EDIT]
changed my code to include linux as the os ;)
mplayer -cache 2048 -user-agent 'QuickTime/7.6.2 (qtver=7.6.2;os=`uname -or`)' http://movies.apple.com/movies/independent/ihopetheyservebeerinhell/ihopetheyservebeerinhell_h.480.mov |