Category Archives: Development

Slow Speeds From Apple

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If you’re experiencing slow download speeds from Apple, it’s very likely their website is being overloaded with the announcement of the new iPods. Previously trailers were hosted on movies.apple.com, which actually redirected to Akamai (worldwide distributed mirrors), so speeds were pretty much guaranteed. However, since we’ve switched to www.apple.com to bypass the QuickTime user agent requirement, we’re now hitting Apple’s main web server directly, which according to my logs is not hosted by Akamai.

If you want to see faster speeds from Apple during this overloaded period, my suggestion is to switch back to movies.apple.com and use a download utility that can spoof the QuickTime user agent. Hopefully after the rush of people interested in seeing the new iPods, speeds will return to normal.

Added Post Date and File Size to Trailers

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2 of the most requested features (trailer post date and trailer file size) have been implemented and is live. Unfortunately, previously I’ve only kept track of the latest date from a particular source, so you’ll notice that all Yahoo! or Apple trailers have the same post date for the same movie. However, moving forward, new trailers should have the correct published dates.

File size was actually a lot simpler (though not as reliable) than I originally imagined. I’m currently just making a HEAD request which returns a set of info including the Content-Length without having to download the whole file to find out. However, once in awhile, the Content-Length that is returned is incorrect or obviously not true.

As I’ve tweeted earlier, I made some changes hopefully that’ll improve performance. I’ve added expiration/cache-control that I learnt from .htaccess File and mod_rewrite examples. I also found out I wasn’t sending the correct headers (which included last modified time and etags), which I’ve fixed.

Another change I’ve made was to default the All Trailers catalog index to display text instead of movie posters. Since most people hit the default page, this should decrease a lot of server hits which used to download several hundred poster images per load.

I’ve also added a 3rd source to our main catalog: Moviefone

As always, comments are welcomed. If you see any issues, we’d like to hear about them too. 😀

New Catalog Views

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If you haven’t noticed, we’ve added 3 new catalog views to our main catalog:

We’re grabbing the data we’re using to generate those views via IMDb.com.

We’ve also restructured the website around instead passing around query parameters, we’ve encoded them into the url itself.

As always, if you see any issues, please do notify us. Any comments are welcomed as always.

Apple Trailer Links Are Working

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As I tweeted earlier, Apple trailer links are once again working. However, the links themselves had to be tweaked a bit. In order to download directly, you’ll have to modify the domain from movies.apple.com to www.apple.com. Once the URL is modified, you can once again use it to direct download. For full detailed instructions, I’ve updated the tutorial.

So far I’ve fixed the main catalog as well as my blog entries. If you see issues with any particular trailer, please let me know.

Personally, I have no idea if this is only a temporary solution or not. Lets keep our fingers crossed and hope Apple doesn’t feel evil again.

We have Dave to thank for this hint.

Switching from QuickTime to JW FLV Player

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Awhile back I enabled mediabox where if you clicked on a resolution from our main catalog, it’ll pop out a video player on top of our page instead of launching the video directly. The problem with that was the object was embedded with QuickTime and you know how much I hate QuickTime.

I was messing around with JW FLV Player and remembered that it was able to play H.264/MP4 files. The idea of trying to use it to play QuickTime/MOV files popped into my head and after testing a bit, it was a success! Took me some time to figure out how to escape an url for FlashVars. Turns out you’ll have to urlencode the following 3 symbols: = ? &

Then I had to remember how to modify mediabox to get it to stop using the QuickTime embedding code and to switch to the SWFObject code I wanted to use. After getting that to work, I realized mediabox has evoled into mediaboxadvanced and was now much cooler. It now has rounded edges and even supports sets of media so you can browse between them w/o having to leave the player. One of these days, I may consider linking up all the trailers or maybe the current top 10. But for now, I’ve linked up all the trailers/clips of the same movie and of the same resolution.

Switching over to the new mediaboxadvanced was pretty straightforward. Took a few tries to figure out which set of MooTools I needed, but once I had my sample page working, it was only updating my scripts to point to the newer versions and a 2 line change to add support to sets and to change mediabox to lightbox. I’ve also enhanced the title to show not only the movie name, but the clip name as well as the resolution.

I’ve tested it out on Firefox and IE8 and they both seem to work fine. Let me know if you hit into any issues.

Too bad the Apple trailer links are still broken unless you change your browser’s User Agent to Quicktime, or this update would’ve been that much cooler.

Direct Download Links from Apple Are Not Working

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Update: Please see this blog post on how to get direct downloading to work again: Apple Trailer Links Are Working

Direct download links for HD trailers on Apple are currently busted. From their tweet, it looks like the change was made to deal with the influx of user traffic/bandwidth for the Avatar trailer:

Adjustments made to support additional #Avatar teaser trailer traffic now live http://tinyurl.com/avatarteaser/ #avatarmovie

It looks like one of the adjustments they made was to only allow Quicktime to download the trailer. Any web browser will be automatically redirected to the Apple – Movie Trailers’ homepage.

If you have a download utility or are able to spoof the User Agent in your browser (i.e. User Agent Switcher for Firefox), you can still get around this.

The user agent my Quicktime uses is:
QuickTime/7.6.2 (qtver=7.6.2;os=Windows NT 5.1Service Pack 3)

I’ve confirmed that the only portion you need is QuickTime.

Using wget, I was able to download the Avatar 1080p trailer with:
wget -U QuickTime http://trailers.apple.com/movies/fox/avatar/avatar2009aug0820a-tsr_h1080p.mov

Update #2: You can also use curl (comes with Mac OSX) to download using the following command:
curl -A QuickTime http://trailers.apple.com/movies/fox/avatar/avatar2009aug0820a-tsr_h1080p.mov

Update: If you want to use the User Agent Switcher for Firefox, you’ll first need to install the extension. After installing the extension, go to Tools > Default User Agent > Edit User Agents…

Create a new User Agent by clicking on New > New User Agent… Clear out all the fields and copy and paste QuickTime/7.6.2 into the Description and User Agent fields.

Switch to the newly created QuickTime/7.6.2 User Agent by selecting it from the Tools > Default User Agent menu. Now you should be able to click/save Apple HD trailers from our site as you normally did before. Remember to switch back to the Default User Agent after you’re done saving trailers.

Update #3: Found this page that’ll teach you step by step on how to change your user agent in the following browsers: Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer: Switching User Agents.

Let’s just hope this is temporary or else it’d be quite inconvenient for users to download HD trailers from Apple anymore.

Archive Batch 8

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With 46 new trailers & clips, Archive Batch 8 is now available! Check out the previous archive batches if you’re interested. With this latest batch, I’ve completed the task of archiving all of the old Apple HD trailers that were around before the start of this website.

  • 300
  • Angel A
  • Balls of Fury
  • Because I Said So
  • Black Book
  • Breach
  • Bridge To Terabithia
  • Daddy’s Little Girls
  • Dead Silence
  • Factory Girl
  • Fred Claus
  • Gray Matters
  • Hannibal Rising
  • Happily N’ever After
  • Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
  • Hot Fuzz
  • Knocked Up
  • Letters From Iwo Jima
  • Mr. Brooks
  • Music and Lyrics
  • Nancy Drew
  • Oceans 13
  • Offside
  • Pride
  • Primeval
  • Rescue Dawn
  • Shooter
  • Shrek the Third
  • Starter For 10
  • The Abandoned
  • The Astronaut Farmer
  • The Dead Girl
  • The Ex
  • The Good Shepherd
  • The Hills Have Eyes 2
  • The Hitcher
  • The Hoax
  • The Invisible
  • The Kingdom
  • The Last Mimzy
  • The Lives of Others
  • The Number 23
  • The Valet
  • Think I Love My Wife
  • Trade
  • Wild Hogs

Archive Batch 7

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With 38 new trailers & clips, Archive Batch 7 is now available! Check out the previous archive batches if you’re interested.

  • Arthur and the Invisibles
  • Blood Diamond
  • Bug
  • Christmas At Maxwell’s
  • Deja Vu
  • Deliver Us from Evil
  • Dinosaurs 3D
  • Dreamgirls
  • El Cortez
  • Eragon
  • Evan Almighty
  • Fur
  • Home of the Brave
  • Hostel: Part II
  • Norbit
  • Notes On a Scandal
  • Pan’s Labyrinth
  • Perfume
  • Smokin’ Aces
  • Surf’s Up
  • Tenacious D In the Pick of Destiny
  • The Good German
  • The History Boys
  • The Messengers
  • The Nativity Story
  • The Painted Veil
  • The Simpsons Movie
  • Turistas
  • Unaccompanied Minors
  • Venus
  • Zodiac

Archive Batch 6

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With 36 new trailers & clips, Archive Batch 6 is now available! Check out the previous archive batches if you’re interested.

  • 17 Again
  • A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints
  • Curse of the Golden Flower
  • Driving Lessons
  • Employee of the Month
  • Fast Food Nation
  • Haven
  • Let’s Go To Prison
  • Little Children
  • Lucky You
  • State Of Play
  • Tenacious D In the Pick of Destiny
  • The Black Dahlia
  • The Protector
  • The Queen
  • The Reaping
  • The Return
  • The Santa Clause 3: the Escape Clause

Index All Text Mode with Sort!

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One of our biggest requests we received was to be able to sort the trailers in our catalog, along with also displaying the actual movie title with the poster. The reason why we didn’t display the movie title was more of a design decision. Movie titles can be very long and that we would either have to increase the area size for the movie title or truncate it, neither which was desirable.

We initially wanted a similar feel to Windows Media Center where they just have posters/thumbnails and if you selected the image, it would show you the title and more information. Due to time constraints, this is currently implemented by showing alternative text when you hover your mouse over the poster.

I’ve been working on the the text mode for a few non-consecutive weekends already. I had actually gotten text mode working a few weeks earlier, but it was very simple and was just a giant list of all the movie titles. This weekend, I spent making it usable and not repulsive. The full design still has a long way to go.

Along with text mode, I’ve also been working on sorting. Sorting was actually quite simple to implement, though I won’t bore you with the details. By default I sort by trailer posted date, but now I allow sorting by movie title. Some work that I need to do around this area is group them alphabetically (by their first letter), ignore “The” if a movie title begins with it, and few other small things here and there.

With that said, enjoy:
Index All – Poster mode sorted by date
Index All – Poster mode sorted by title
Index All – Text mode sorted by date
Index All – Text mode sorted by title