(idea) by danila Sat Feb 01 2003 at 23:16:03

Unfortunately, evil corporations never stop in their quest to control their media files, our software, our computers, us and our firstborns. Now Apple sometimes uses another trick, intended to stop saving of their precious trailers. I can't understand why, because downloading it again wastes THEIR bandwidth as well...

Here is what they do. The page displays somethings that looks like picture. It has words, saying something like "Click here to view the trailer". Clicking on it replaces the picture with the video. The problem is that this picture is not actually an image, but a Quicktime media file. But it is not the video, it's just a few kilobytes in size. This means that you are unable to find the URL to the video in the page source. And Quicktime is smart enough not to keep a copy of the video file in the cache. Now there are two possibilities:

  1. You are lucky. Usually after clicking on such picture you can open the next Quicktime file (the latest *.qt or *.mov file in your cache directory) in a text editor and find the http:// links in the beginning of the file. You can now copy these links and download the files.
  2. You are unlucky. But sometimes viewing the small Quicktime file from the cache in a text editor doesn't reveal any links &emdash; they are not always stored as plain text. The solution: Use something that keeps the track of all HTTP connections, like AtGuard! firewall. The instructions below are for AtGuard! 3.2.
    1. If you watched the video file already, close Quicktime, clear browser cache, and close the browser.
    2. Restart the browser
    3. Open the trailer page
    4. Click on the AtGuard! icon in the system tray and select Event Log from the menu.
    5. Open Web History tab.
    6. Select Clear Tab from the Log menu.
    7. Return to the browser and "click to view the trailer".
    8. Return to Event Log. You will see several new records.
    9. One of them is the Quicktime video file. Copy the URL from the bottom part of the screen and download using the browser, wget or anything else.

Note: There is a useful program called StreamBox VCR. It is now discontinued, but you still can find it online. It allows you to save streaming media (Real, Windows Media, etc.). It can also be used to automatically follow links embedded in the media files. I am not sure if it allows to save streaming Quicktime video, since I don't find such files as often as I find streaming Real or WM files, but most probably, it does.

I like it!