May 10, 2010
I love films. All of them to be exact. I believe you just have to be in the right mood and you would enjoy even few of the worst movies ever made. Even though I am a proponent of open source philosophy, we as a society are obviously not ready to embrace it in entertainment industry just yet.
This is where www.apple.com/trailers comes into play. Apple made great deals with movie studios and you can watch/download newest movie trailers. Well...sort of. Apple employs variety of restrictions which makes this site next to useless on a Linux desktop. It hides links to trailers themselves behind reference files so that when you download with your favorite browser, you will only get small reference file not the trailer itself. And that is after you circumvent user-agent protection. Because apple believes nothing but iTunes/iPad/iOtherAppleStuff should access these trailers. There are scripts around that can make downloading possible for Linux users. I have been using Apple Trailer Download script for Greasemonkey for quite some time, but it always stopped working after some time.
Another opportunity for me I guess. I have been trying to improve my Python-fu for some time so what better way then a small project like this? I started last weekend after I found out Apple actually publishes JSON data of trailers on its site. This made access quite easy from python and is quite error-prone to changes of website itself (as long as Apple doesn't pull whole JSON thingy...but they are actively using it too). Long story short...there are two outputs from this endeavor:
This is where www.apple.com/trailers comes into play. Apple made great deals with movie studios and you can watch/download newest movie trailers. Well...sort of. Apple employs variety of restrictions which makes this site next to useless on a Linux desktop. It hides links to trailers themselves behind reference files so that when you download with your favorite browser, you will only get small reference file not the trailer itself. And that is after you circumvent user-agent protection. Because apple believes nothing but iTunes/iPad/iOtherAppleStuff should access these trailers. There are scripts around that can make downloading possible for Linux users. I have been using Apple Trailer Download script for Greasemonkey for quite some time, but it always stopped working after some time.
Another opportunity for me I guess. I have been trying to improve my Python-fu for some time so what better way then a small project like this? I started last weekend after I found out Apple actually publishes JSON data of trailers on its site. This made access quite easy from python and is quite error-prone to changes of website itself (as long as Apple doesn't pull whole JSON thingy...but they are actively using it too). Long story short...there are two outputs from this endeavor:
- pytrailer - python module to simplify access to movies on apple.com/trailers
- pyqtrailer - Qt4 interface that displays poster, movie information and enables downloading of trailers
# easy_install pyqtrailer
should work as long as you have PyQt4 installed. You can just run pyqtrailer now and you should see something like this:
That's it. I will improve/fix it a bit but don't expect too much :-)
should work as long as you have PyQt4 installed. You can just run pyqtrailer now and you should see something like this:
That's it. I will improve/fix it a bit but don't expect too much :-)
