Downloading Apple Trailers

Posted by Raphael on June 2nd, 2011

I enjoy watching movie trailers and iTunes Movie Trailers is a wonderful resource for high-quality, current trailers. The problem is that I can not view Quicktime videos in my browser — and might not want to if I could — but downloading the files is not immediately possible.

Luckily, I found this guide on how to download trailers from Apple’s archive. Since it is tiresome to perform these steps by hand for every trailer, I put a little Ruby script together to ease the process:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

if ( ARGV.size > 0 )
  Dir.chdir("/path/to/target/dir")
  ARGV.each { |url|
    url = url.gsub(/_(\d+p)\.mov/, '_h\1.mov')
    IO::popen("wget -U \"QuickTime/7.6.5\" #{url}").readlines
  }
end

Calling this script with URLs you get from the Watch Now menus downloads trailers directly to the directory of your desire.