Looks like Apple direct downloads are working again if you replace the subdomain. Anyway, I’ve modified our main catalog to automatically switch to using www.apple.com when it detect that direct download is working. When it detects that direct downloads are broken, it’ll switch back to use movies.apple.com and add the yellow alert bar at the top.
As for the blog, I’m going to continue using movies.apple.com. There are plans to add a filter/plugin that’ll automatically switch the subdomain.
Thanks to Le Bao Phuc for sending this in. It looks like replacing the subdomain for Apple trailers with www is working again, similar to the fix 2 months ago.
Given that Apple disabled this workaround after about a month, and now it’s starting to work again, I’m not sure now long before they disable it again.
I’ve updated all the Apple trailer URLs back to using www.apple.com (instead of movies.apple.com). Let me know if you encounter any issues.
Apple HD trailer links are broken again. I currently don’t have time to look too deep into the issue, but from a quick analysis, it looks like the domain www.apple.com has blocked out all access movie trailers. You may recall that the solution that bypassed the QuickTime user agent check was to change the domain movies.apple.com to www.apple.com in the url.
The current workaround is back to setting the user agent and using the movies.apple.com domain. For more information about the workaround, please read Direct Download Links from Apple Are Not Working.
Remember in order for the workaround to work, you have to change the domain from www.apple.com to movies.apple.com, if it’s not already correct.
See Update: Replacing Subdomain Working Again For Apple Trailers
I’d like to welcome yyoyoma as the latest member to our team.
He’ll be providing RapidShare mirror links to our blog posts. I’m still currently working on a design to see if I’m able to incorporate it into our main catalog. But for now in our main catalog, you’ll find a new Mirrors link underneath the trailers.
Enjoy!
Looks like one of our WordPress plugins were generating excessive load on our 1and1 DB. The culprit appears to be Recently Popular, which was doing some sophisticated SQL queries. I’ve since disabled that and switched to Wordpress.com Stats Helper, which stores the visitor data on their end.
Let’s hope this resolves the issue and that we’ll be seeing less 500 Internal Server Error. Maybe it’s time to look into dedicated servers or co-location hosting. If so, I’m definitely not going with 1and1 given how unhappy I was on how they dealt with this situation.
I sent the following email to them:
Thanks for clarifying the issue. I’ve disabled the plugin that generates the queries below and hopefully will resolve the issue.
However, there are several questions/expectations I have, which I feel 1and1 could have done a lot better at.
1. The T&C’s are very vague about “excessive load”. Is there a way for me to see what type of load I’m generating and if there is, what defines excessive load? If there isn’t a way, how does a customer even know when he’s generating excessive load?
2. When a customer is putting excessive load on shared resources, I would’ve expected warnings or at minimal a notification that my database was going to be shut down. I found out several hours later my website was no longer able to connect to the database. I then had to call in inquiring about why my database was “closed” and the customer service on the other end was not able to give me a reason because the department in charge of this was closed. I’m extremely unhappy with how this situation was dealt with.
Given this, what’s the next step in restoring the database which you have shut down.
Their reply:
It appeared as if you were using MySQL for logging, so we would suggest not using that. Depending on the severity of the load, we do send out warnings before stopping connectivity, but in your case our System Admins in Germany acted as they did because your database was already affecting our other customers on the server.
I like how their reply hardly answered any of my questions…
For those who don’t follow us on Twitter or notice the new link at the bottom of our homepage, we’ve started our own Facebook Fan Page. We’re not sure how we plan on using it yet, but welcome any ideas.
Some of the things I’ve been contemplating about include:
Initially I began importing the blog posts via RSS feed, but that really just sort of spammed the fan page. Plus we already have RSS and Twitter for that, and I didn’t want the fan page to become another status update. On Twitter, it’s more about fans communicating with us. On Facebook, fans can now interact with each other, which I think is pretty neat.
Let me hear some ideas! 
If you’re experiencing slow download speeds from Apple, it’s very likely their website is being overloaded with the announcement of the new iPods. Previously trailers were hosted on movies.apple.com, which actually redirected to Akamai (worldwide distributed mirrors), so speeds were pretty much guaranteed. However, since we’ve switched to www.apple.com to bypass the QuickTime user agent requirement, we’re now hitting Apple’s main web server directly, which according to my logs is not hosted by Akamai.
If you want to see faster speeds from Apple during this overloaded period, my suggestion is to switch back to movies.apple.com and use a download utility that can spoof the QuickTime user agent. Hopefully after the rush of people interested in seeing the new iPods, speeds will return to normal.
2 of the most requested features (trailer post date and trailer file size) have been implemented and is live. Unfortunately, previously I’ve only kept track of the latest date from a particular source, so you’ll notice that all Yahoo! or Apple trailers have the same post date for the same movie. However, moving forward, new trailers should have the correct published dates.
File size was actually a lot simpler (though not as reliable) than I originally imagined. I’m currently just making a HEAD request which returns a set of info including the Content-Length without having to download the whole file to find out. However, once in awhile, the Content-Length that is returned is incorrect or obviously not true.
As I’ve tweeted earlier, I made some changes hopefully that’ll improve performance. I’ve added expiration/cache-control that I learnt from .htaccess File and mod_rewrite examples. I also found out I wasn’t sending the correct headers (which included last modified time and etags), which I’ve fixed.
Another change I’ve made was to default the All Trailers catalog index to display text instead of movie posters. Since most people hit the default page, this should decrease a lot of server hits which used to download several hundred poster images per load.
I’ve also added a 3rd source to our main catalog: Moviefone
As always, comments are welcomed. If you see any issues, we’d like to hear about them too. 
If you haven’t noticed, we’ve added 3 new catalog views to our main catalog:
We’re grabbing the data we’re using to generate those views via IMDb.com.
We’ve also restructured the website around instead passing around query parameters, we’ve encoded them into the url itself.
As always, if you see any issues, please do notify us. Any comments are welcomed as always.
As I tweeted earlier, Apple trailer links are once again working. However, the links themselves had to be tweaked a bit. In order to download directly, you’ll have to modify the domain from movies.apple.com to www.apple.com. Once the URL is modified, you can once again use it to direct download. For full detailed instructions, I’ve updated the tutorial.
So far I’ve fixed the main catalog as well as my blog entries. If you see issues with any particular trailer, please let me know.
Personally, I have no idea if this is only a temporary solution or not. Lets keep our fingers crossed and hope Apple doesn’t feel evil again.
We have Dave to thank for this hint.
Recent Comments