Apple Denies Linux Access To Its Movie Trailers

Apple has decided to block streaming content from http://apple.com/trailers/ for Linux users.  I say this because tonight I went to view a few of the upcoming movie trailers and was told to “Get the Latest Quicktime” in order to watch and I was denied the ability to watch them.

I hit the forums to see if others have the same problems that I have and I’ve found that many people have begun reporting the problem from around May of this year.  Not being one to give up, I decided to test things a bit to see what apple.com was doing.

I installed the useragent switcher on Firefox and switched my agent to Windows Vista and IE7.  I then watched headers as apple once again denied me despite my agent being accepted by it.  It seems that it is looking for an actual install of Quicktime on your system (I can’t tell you for sure, I just know that useragent isn’t what it is sniffing for).

How does one circumvent?  Pretty simple.  When you are given that denied message “Get the Latest Quicktime”, go to View >> Page Source.  Look for a URL that ends in .mov.  Copy that URL and paste it into a new tab.  That’s it,  you’re now watching the trailer.

I want to thank Apple for being exclusionary to Linux users when you benefit so greatly from Open Source software.  It sets a great example and shows what is really important to you as a company…and that is forcing your software onto everyone similar to Microsoft.

UPDATE:  I wanted to let everyone know my platform since everyone seems to think I’m silly enough to blog about this without installing the proper codecs.  I use PCLinuxOS 2007 as my main workhorse distro.  The apple trailers site worked for me previously until I recently checked it.  I’ve updated this
to current and have all codecs installed (w32codecs, mplayer, xine,
gstreamer, etc.).  I have uninstalled, reinstalled, and tweaked
everything I can think of tweaking to get this working.  Nothing thus
far works.  I should note that this is with Firefox 3 and I’m not sure
if that has anything to do with things.

Follow-Up: BBC Caves on iPlayer – Linux Support Added

Looks like the BBC buckled under backlash from bloggers (say that 20 times fast). They’ll be offering their iPlayer in Mac and Linux flavors 🙂

I talked about what a crock they had begun to simmer with a Windows only version a few weeks ago. Glad to see that they have understood that the benefits outweigh the caveats many times over.

It’s much like standards compliant web pages…you only limit yourself by making your page non-compliant…because it won’t display in all browsers. You lose business if you have an ecommerce site…you lost hits if you have a blog. The BBC now understands that by limiting the ability of those to use its player, it shut the door to those users. It also knows that a network of bloggers is a powerful force to be reckoned with.

Whether Linux and Mac users be a small number or a large number, the BBC has set precedent here that I hope they follow in the future. Keep Open BBC!

Creative Commons License
Except where otherwise noted, the content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.