Apple, a bunch of douchebags?!

Good lord, are you really that afraid Apple? Check this this bug-entry.

20 Responses to “Apple, a bunch of douchebags?!”

  1. Darwin Says:

    They’ll probably switch to HTTP-Streaming \http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP-Streaming\ very soon!

  2. Greg Says:

    Are they seriously that scared?!

    Next they’ll make Safari not display pages served from a Linux server….

  3. Mike Says:

    I would guess it’s just to ensure that people have a recent QT version, an everybody has a nice experience of the site.

    I don’t think it’s meant against free implementations.

  4. Mike Says:

    Oh, missed the part where it says, that this is new, and it happens, even when the movie is directly queried.

    Ok, it’s really lame.

  5. Peter Says:

    Yup, I was wondering what are they doing, few days ago I was not able to see any trailer with the gecko mplayer plugin , this explains a lot, unfortunately I do now know how to patch mplayer… I will have to manually download the movies with wget. Unfortunate…

  6. Andrew Says:

    I don’t think it is right of apple to do this, however I believe their motive is not to block FOSS, the reason they started scrubbing their userstrings is because of the flood of traffic they had when they made the new avatar movie trailer available, you can see their consecutive tweets here:


    Adjustments made to support additional Avatar teaser trailer traffic now live http://tinyurl.com/avatarte... avatarmovie8:32 AM Aug 20th from web

    Avatar teaser experiencing heavy traffic.7:23 AM Aug 20th from web

    Exclusive James Cameron film AVATAR teaser trailer live: http://tinyurl.com/avatarte... #avatar #avatarmovie 3D 3-d #animation #cgi7:02 AM Aug 20th from web

    Or maybe this is just a cover story … :-)

  7. JAM Says:

    I’d been using wget to download a lot of HD trailers from the Apple trailers website in the last couple of weeks, but I wouldn’t’ work when I tried to get the Avatar trailer, I just ended up with an index.html file every time. First I thought they were just hit with a lot of traffic, but after it never got fixed I got a little suspicious, now I know I guess.

    Is there any hacky way around this so I can just continue to use wget? Or at least something that will let me download the .movs, I want the actual files so I can stream them to through my 360 and watch them on my TV :}

  8. asdf Says:

    JAM:wget -U QuickTime/7.6.2

  9. Andreas Nilsson Says:

    Hahaha, yes they are.

    Andrew: If they don’t want traffic, why are they on The Internet in the first place? :)

  10. MacSlow Says:

    If someone uses curl (instead of wget) you’d be using a command-line like:

    curl -A "QuickTime/7.6.2" -C - -# -O http://movies.apple.com/movies/fox/avatar/avatar2009aug0820a-tsr_h720p.mov
  11. Kastanessen Says:

    Afraid? Doubt it. Wanting to provide the best user experience for people using their software? Sure.

  12. Erik Says:

    mplayer -user-agent QuickTime/7.6.2

    or

    user-agent=QuickTime/7.6.2
    in ~/.mplayer/config

  13. Dylan McCall Says:

    For the time being, this downloads faster anyway: http://www.demonoid.com/files/details/2039054/20177444/ :)

  14. JAM Says:

    Thanks a lot asdf and MacSlow, both of those work perfectly - I learned something every day :D

  15. Jeremy Says:

    I don’t think Apple’s motive is to block FOSS either — it is most likely so that the web page chrome gets displayed properly around the video (i.e. display ads to the user) in case somebody sends a link (such as e-mail) directly to the video, not the page in question.

    Besides, Microsoft has been doing exactly the same for years and years. You can’t get a proper video stream and instead get served with an ASX XML file if you don’t have an “NSPlayer” user-agent. All Windows Media-compatible streamers (including VLC and GStreamer) use the proper NSPlayer user-agent when streaming.

    It’s the exact same reason why online radio streams serve you with an M3U file rather than hyperlinking directly to the MP3 stream.

  16. Nathan Nutter Says:

    How would this be related to “fear”?

    See randomness.

  17. Mike Says:

    Anyone tried the YouTube totem plug-in recently?

    I always get errors there too, regarding no permission to open the (remote) file.

    Maybe the same?

  18. Troy James Sobotka Says:

    Amen MacSlow, amen.

    I find it absolutely revolting how many Free Software ’supporters’ roll out their iPhones, Macbooks, or like Apple device.

    Disgusting and sad. To every cheater out there (you know who you are) that feeds on the publicity and interest of our loyal community by day and supports this type of behaviour by night, shame on you.

  19. Rob Says:

    Speaking of Apple…

    I think the iPhone OS 3.0 blocks certain trailer sites. It will no longer play Quicktime movies from certain trailer sites (i.e. Dave`s Trailer Page). I don’t know if this is true or whether it is just a bug but I`ve noticed this happening on my iPod touch when I am running the 3.0 firmware. The trailers worked perfectly fine on those sites with the 2.0 firmware. There is no problem playing trailers from Apple.com in either OS version.

  20. Craig Says:

    Ha… OK, I assumed that I had wrecked my system with some update (as I’m running very new versions of the Intel drivers and XOrg) as MPlayer has been broken for a while for some random reason… so this is good to hear (or not)

    My solution was to just start watching trailers on Youtube… to hell with fixing this

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