Helpful Hints – Apple Movie Trailers download using Firefox, Greasemonkey, and User Agent hack

You can't stop us Apple!

Only a few days ago I was disappointed to find that Apple had once again broken movie trailer downloads for non-iTunes users.  Thanks to the input of a few commentators on this blog, I think I’ve found a new workaround for Firefox/Greasemonkey users.

The workaround uses a combination of the most excellent Apple Trailer Download script by zatic (not my modified version — I’ll get to this in just a bit), and a modification to the User Agent string that Firefox uses to identify itself to websites.

First of all, you’ll need to download this great experimental Firefox addon, HeaderControl (Disclaimer: always use caution with beta/experimental software.  I’m not responsible for any harm you may cause your computer).  What we’ll be using HeaderControl for is to enable a modified User Agent string for only the Apple trailer download site.  Some of you may have the popular User Agent Switcher extension installed, which could work as well, but I chose HeaderControl for this workaround because it allows per-domain user-agent switching.  The “per-domain” bit means I don’t have to keep switching the Firefox user agent for the trailers site, and back again.

Now, once you’ve installed HeaderControl, reboot Firefox and bring up the preferences dialog for HeaderControl.

HeaderControl Options dialog.

Clicking the “Add” button, go ahead and create a new per-domain configuration for the domain, movies.apple.com, and specify the custom user agent string “Quicktime/7.6.2“.  Note that you’ll only need to choose the “Mangle HTTP ‘UserAgent’” option.  You can leave alone the Referer and Language tabs.

Make sure the suffix is "movies.apple.com" and that you have the user agent correct.

Press “OK” to commit the new per-domain filter, and you’ll be good to go.

For those of you who do not care to download the trailers but  just want to watch the trailers in your browser, you should be good to go.  Go ahead, hit up the trailers site and watch something special.

For those of you who want to download the trailers but don’t know how, you can refer to my original instructions, which should now work again.

Finally, if you’re amongst those who followed the steps in my previous post on the issue of Apple trailer download breakage by installing my modified Apple trailer download Greasemonkey script, then you have one more step to complete:  disable my script and go back to using the original Apple Trailer Download script by zatic.

Disable my "fixed" script. It's no longer required.

Once you’ve done this you should find yourself able to download movie trailers from Apple’s site once again.

Apple Movie Trailer downloads are broken… yet again

Apple sez no trailers for you.

Wow, Apple seems very determined to break Apple Movie Trailer downloads for non-iTunes users. In their latest salvo at everyone who does not own a Mac and those who choose not to use iTunes, Apple has corrected both the www hack and user agent hack outlined in my last post on the topic.  This also renders my Greaseonkey script useless.

For the time being, I don’t have another workaround or fix to try, but as soon as I learn of one, I’ll be sure to share it.

Eye candy IS a critical business requirement

I recently came across the presentation, Eye Candy is a Critical Business Requirement. Stephen Anderson of Poetpainter delivered this presentation at a Usability Professionals’ Association in July 2008.

As a software professional with one foot in development and one foot in design, this presentation really reasonated with me.  Eye candy really IS a critical business requirement.

(Found via: Delicious Popular list)

Apple Movie Trailer downloads are broken

iTunes Movie Trailers doesn't want us.

In the past I had recommended a wonderful Greasemonkey script that would allow one to directly download the trailers from Apple Movie Trailers. Who wants to watch awesome trailers in a browser window anyhow?

It now seems like Apple has intentionally broken this and other means of downloading their trailers directly, as covered by hd-trailers.net:

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.

Those great guys have a workaround though.  If you’re a Linux/OS X user, you can simply use wget with the Quicktime User Agent string:

wget -U QuickTime/7.6.2 http://movies.apple.com/movies/fox/avatar/avatar2009aug0820a-tsr_h1080p.mov

If you’re on Leopard, you may not have wget.  In this case you may be able to use curl -O which supposedly does the same thing, though I can’t verify that this works:

curl -A QuickTime/7.6.2 -O http://movies.apple.com/movies/fox/avatar/avatar2009aug0820a-tsr_h1080p.mov

Another workaround, one that would also be simpler for Windows users, is to try using the User Agent Switcher Firefox extension.  Just make sure to use the Quicktime User Agent string in the examples above.

Windows users intent on using wget can try their luck with the GNU Utilities for Win32.

Update: Krunk from hd-trailers.net has commented that direct download will work if you just tweak the URL a bit.  Where the trailer typically comes from movies.apple.com, just change that to www.apple.com.  Be sure to check out their download guide.

Hmm… now to see whether we can get the Greasemonkey script updated to do this for us…

Update 2: I’ve uploaded a fixed version of zatic’s original Apple Trailer Download script to userscripts.org.  I’ve simply applied the fix noted in the previous update, to the original script.

Helpful Hints – Tabbing to form fields in Firefox

Ever wish you could press in Firefox and get focus on the first form field of the page, ignoring all the links? Or maybe you want to tab between all form elements with the exception of text fields? Or perhaps you want tabbing behaviour that is some combination of the above?

The developers behind Firefox realized that people would want tab behaviour conforming to their personal keyboard accessibility requirements, and to this end they’ve included a very handy means of getting the behaviour you want.

Enter the accessibility.tabfocus configuration.  This property allows you to specify an integer corresponding to a particular tab focusing behaviour.

From the Mozillazine Knowledgebase, the possible values for this property are:

1 – Give focus to text fields only. (The default in OS X.)
2 – Give focus to all form elements except text fields.
4 – Give focus to links (and linked images) only.

The value for accessibility.tabfocus can also be an integer like 7 (which is the default value). 7 (1+2+4) implies that Firefox will focus all field elements and links as well; its effect is the behaviour of 1, 2, and 4, combined.

You can read up a bit more to understand the different values.

For those who have forgotten how to manipulate the advanced configuration preferences in Firefox, you can do so as follows:

Open a new tab and enter “about:config” into the address bar:

Firefox's about:config disclaimer.

Accept the disclaimer that you may break Firefox if you don’t know what you’re doing.  I’d advise the reader to be careful about what they do beyond this point!

Enter “tabfocus” into the Filter field to find the accessibility.tabfocus property:

The 'accessibility.tabfocus' property on the about:config page.

Now just double click the property to be prompted for a new value.

Personally, I would like to tab through all form fields while ignoring links on the page.  To achieve this outcome, I used a value of 3 (1 + 2), a combination of tabbing through text fields and tabbing through other form fields.

I hope this Helpful Hint is of use to those of you who are big on keyboard accessibility.