Say what you will about Apple, but they do provide the highest quality movie trailers online. The only problem is they make it extremely difficult to save them to your PC unless you own a registered copy of Quicktime Pro or iTunes.

We won't be needing either for this simple tutorial. It might seem a little convoluted but after doing it a couple of times you'll realise it's actually really simple.

Disclaimer: I believe that following these instructions may actually be a violation of Apples terms and conditions, particularly:

You may not use any “deep-link”, “page-scrape”, “robot”, “spider” or other automatic device, program, algorithm or methodology, or any similar or equivalent manual process, to access, acquire, copy or monitor any portion of the Site or any Content, or in any way reproduce or circumvent the navigational structure or presentation of the Site or any Content, to obtain or attempt to obtain any materials, documents or information through any means not purposely made available through the Site. Apple reserves the right to bar any such activity.

Venture at your own risk.

What you'll need

• wget for Windows
• a text editor
• a few minutes

Hit apple.com/trailers and visit the page of a movie trailer you want to download, For this tutorial I'm going to use the Ironman 2 trailer page and grab the 1080 version.

View the source code of the page and look for the link to the 1080p version. A quick way is to search the source for the term 1080p. You should find something like this:

http://movies.apple.com/movies/paramount/ironman2/ironman2-z7r459g-tlr1_1080p.mov

Copy it to your clipboard and using your leet command line skills in wget:

wget http://movies.apple.com/movies/paramount/ironman2/ironman2-z7r459g-tlr1_1080p.mov

...and hit enter. This will instantly download a small file which is normally used by Quicktime 7 to load the trailer. In this case the downloaded file is called ironman2-z7r459g-tlr1_1080p.mov

Note: Files downloaded with wget will automatically save into the same directory where wget resides.

Open the ironman2-z7r459g-tlr1_1080p.mov file in a text editor and you'll see some garbage along with part of the URL to the movie trailer file, which I've shown highlighted below.

We're nearly done. Remember the original URL? We are going to simply change the last part that references the mov file with the version we got from the text file.

So the original:

http://movies.apple.com/movies/paramount/ironman2/ironman2-z7r459g-tlr1_1080p.mov

...now becomes this:

http://movies.apple.com/movies/paramount/ironman2/ironman2-z7r459g-tlr1_h1080p.mov

Now for the final part. Go back to wget and enter this command which contains our new URL:

wget -U "QuickTime/7.6.2" http://movies.apple.com/movies/paramount/ironman2/ironman2-z7r459g-tlr1_h1080p.mov

This command makes the server think the user agent is Quicktime 7.6.2, and consequently permits the download.

In a few minutes you will have the 1080p version of the trailer to playback on demand.

Simplifying the process

The only difference in this case between the original URL and our custom URL is the latter has h1080p.mov instead of just 1080p.mov. I'm not sure if this the case for all, but you can easily cut out the first stage of this tutorial and see what happens by simply adding the h and running the wget command. If it fails, then you'll need to do as described with the text file to get the file name.

Too easy.

PS: I wouldn't know if this can be done on a Mac or not, but you can get wget for Linux and the instructions should be the same. I'd be glad to take comments from people who can confirm or deny if that works.

PPS: This worked fine on Windows 7, and it should also work on older versions.