Getting to save those pesky Apple.com trailers on our hard drive was easy, if you knew how: One simply had to open the source of the webpage the trailer was embedded in, find the desired resolution and add an “h” before it and tada, you could let your download manager do the dirty work. Another nice alternative if you were a Firefox user, was to have the Greasemonkey Apple Trailer Download script installed, which essentially did the same thing.
Alas, since mid-August 2009 Apple added an extra measure to ensure that only Quicktime can save those movies. This is where another Firefox Extension comes in handy, called User Agent Switcher. Only thing left to do is add a custom user agent value of “QuickTime/7.6.2 (qtver=7.6.2;os=Windows NT 5.1Service Pack 3)”, for example and you’re back in business. Just make sure you don’t pass the URL along to an external download manager, since it will use its own user agent.
Another option is to input the custom user agent to a download manager directly, FlashGet does have that capability. Big props go to the guys in the Apple Trailer Download forum, namely rbot and hach22 without which I wouldn’t have anyone to blatantly steal their enlightened knowledge from.
