[vox-tech] Quicktime/mov

[Rick Moen]

Quoting aaronb at mcn.org (aaronb at mcn.org):

> However, like the, "Tux 500" did it for you regarding him, I have
> other issues with both MS and apple, hence why I switched to Ubuntu 11
> months ago.

I do hear where you're coming from, Aaron.  Welcome to the Linux
community, then!

> Using the links you provided, I did find this:
> http://www.hd-trailers.net/blog/2009/08/20/direct-download-links-from-apple-are-not-working/
> and
> http://twitter.com/iTunesTrailers/status/3429452495
> So the speculation was because of the high volume of traffic for the
> Avatar trailer, apple changed the website to deny access to movie trailers
> to anyone not using quicktime.

First, I'm not entirely clear on the logic of that.  The Twitter link
says they did something to support additional traffic, but doesn't say
what, and it certainly doesn't say they were specifically trying to
limit connections to QuickTime clients only.  Second, if they _were_
trying to do the latter, they did an awfully poor job:  My inference (I
could be wrong, but it sounds like a lot of other similar cases I've
looked at more closely) is that all they did was make their torturous
Javascript just a little more tortuous, requiring inline handlers to be
updated to match.  

Apple _does_ know how to make it difficult to use anything but its
software.  Trying to get to the iTunes Music Store using anything but
Apple iTunes software is a pretty non-trivial problem, for example.[0]
But they didn't do that, here.

The hd-trailers.net link you provided simply _asserts_ that the Twitter
link's wording means they were trying to make it impossible to use
anything but inline QuickTime -- which, as I pointed out, they didn't do
-- but upon examination this turns out to mean nothing more than "site
uses Javascript to check the User-Agent string and somehow see if
QuickTime is mentioned".

Anyway, presumably mplayerplug-in 3.55 (or higher) and gecko-mediaplayer
0.6.2 (or higher) play the familiar game of feeding cruddy Javascript 
what it wants to hear.  This is part of a widespread problem of sites 
imposing dumb tests based on User-Agent.  A general tool to work around
that site brain-damage, which I recommend highly, is User Agent
Switcher, an extension for Firefox.  Most of the time, I use it to set
User-Agent to the string "W3C standards are important.  Stop f---ing
obsessing over user-agent already".[1]

(Also highly recommended:  NoScript for Firefox.)


[0] http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Apps/AV/itunes.html
[1] See:  http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Web/user-agent-string.html