Yahoo! has once again changed their API. Although I have discovered how to obtain the direct download URL, it’s only a temporary URL which expires quickly. That makes it unusable on our site.

Therefore, I’ve written a redirection script which runs some javascript that obtains and redirects you the temporary URL. At which point, you should be able to view and download the trailer. Unfortunately that means if you’re using a download utility or attempt to right click and save as…, it won’t work for you anymore.

I apologize for this inconvenience and if there’s any further development, I’ll be sure to let you know.

I also plan on updating the Yahoo! download tutorial shortly.

Happy Holidays!

Update 2013/06/03: Updated the Yahoo! Download Tutorial

Option 1: Open the link in a new tab/window:

Option 2: Click Download when the trailer is playing:

The good news: We’ve figured out how the new Yahoo! Movies site works.
The bad news: Not everything is rosy.

The biggest difference is the new HD trailers are encoded in MP4 instead of MOV. I actually prefer MP4, but the biggest issue is the quality has severely dropped. We typically encode 1080p @ 10Mbps. The new Yahoo! 1080p MP4 encodes are at 4Mbps, less than half the original quality of the old MOVs. This is almost if not as bad as YouTube encodes, and YouTube encodes aren’t watermarked. It saddens me Yahoo! has taken this path.

Another problem is Yahoo! trailers/clips aren’t always associated with a movie. For example, a new trailer they released yesterday was for Cirkus Columbia. If you tried to search for that movie, it’s not even listed in their database.

We weren’t able to automate posting new Yahoo! trailers that didn’t have a movie associated with it. Those will be done manually for now, which means delays.

As for instructions on how to find the download links for Yahoo! trailers on its new site, I’ll be updating our Download from Yahoo! tutorial when I have some free time. The process is a lot more complicated than before, so it may take some time before I publish it.

Update: I’ve posted a rough draft of the new instructions. If you have any questions regarding the instructions, feel free to ask in the comments below.

For anyone that’s been monitoring Yahoo’s High Definition Trailers Page, you’ve probably noticed they’ve really been slacking off, only updating once or twice a week, while new HD trailers come out everyday.

I’ve decided to go a different route and monitor their recently added trailers page instead and this should provide quicker updates to new trailer releases.

Another good thing that came out of this is now the main catalog will also include HD clips from Yahoo!, something I had been planning to do for some time.

Enjoy!

It looks like Yahoo! HD Trailers Page had a slight format change and therefore broke my parser. However, the parser has now been fixed. If you see anything weird, please notify us.

I’ve also made another fix where sometimes multiple Yahoo! trailers would point to the same url. That was due to the caching logic we had. I’ve went ahead and fixed the logic and now urls should always be up-to-date.

I also wrote an array recursive comparison function. There’s probably a bunch in the wild, but I couldn’t find one on php.net:

/// <summary>
/// Does a recursive array comparison
/// </summary>
/// <param name=”array1″>1st array</param>
/// <param name=”array2″>2nd array</param>
/// <returns>if the 2 arrays match</returns>
function array_equals_recursive( $array1, $array2 )
{
    if( count( array_diff_assoc( $array1, $array2 )) != 0 ||
        count( array_diff_assoc( $array2, $array1 ) ) != 0 )
    {
        return false;
    }
   
    foreach( array_keys( $array1 ) as $key )
    {
        if( is_array( $array1[ $key ] ) ||
            is_array( $array2[ $key ] ) )
        {
            if( !is_array( $array1[ $key ] ) ||
                !is_array( $array2[ $key ] ) ||
                !array_equals_recursive(
                    $array1[ $key ],
                    $array2[ $key ] ) )
            {
                return false;
            }
        }
    }
   
    return true;
}