Existing mirror links will not be taken down, but moving forward, you’ll probably notice its absence.

Only in the case where it’s no longer accessible or people are having problems downloading, will I be creating mirror links that appear in the post.

1. Not all trailers are located in /hd anymore
2. HD trailers can now be mixed in with standard trailers
3. There’s 2 layouts I’ve noticed so far: single vs multiple trailer mode

I’ve gone ahead and fixed all the source links to point to the main page instead of /hd, but I’m still working on a fix for the parser so it can work for all their layouts. I’m hoping to be able to fix the parser this weekend.

Update: Looks like I got the parser up and working. If you notice any errors or broken links, please do let us know. Thanks!

Our only option was to test out file sharing sites and I had a set of requirements, which previously none had met:

• At least a 200MB file size cap
• Remote uploading (pass in URL and have it remotely download it)
• Free

Most file sharing sites capped the max file size to 100MB. Most 720p and 1080p are between 100-200MB, making it unfeasible to support HD trailers. There are a few that go to 300MB and 1GB, but then they didn’t satisfy the 2nd requirement.

The 2nd requirement is support for remote uploads. I don’t have the time nor bandwidth to download all 3 trailer resolutions first and then upload it afterwards. With remote uploading, I can just pass in an URL and it’ll go fetch and download the trailer.

After a small confrontation yesterday, Alex emails me that RapidShare had recently bumped their maximum file size from 100MB to 200MB. They already supported remote uploads, so this was great news!

I’ve tested out a few and it looks like all new trailers moving forward will have a RapidShare Mirror section. Do note that files are only stored as long as there is activity. After 90 days of inactivity, RapidShare will delete it from their servers.

Unfortunately, the IGN trailers that caused all this commotion doesn’t support remote upload. I may eventually upload those manually.

For those who have played with RapidShare Remote Upload, is there a way to clear all those jobs that have completed without manually deleting them one by one?

A day or two ago, TekMan alerted me that the Red Band trailer link for Burn After Reading was broken. I checked and indeed it was and interestingly enough, it was completely removed from Apple’s website.

Today, Matt emails me and tells me the Red Band trailer was broken for Wanted and that piqued my curiosity. I went and checked every single Red Band trailer (there’s been 4 so far) and they were all no longer available. They’re not even available on iTunes anymore.

• Wanted
• Burn After Reading
• Step Brothers
• Tropic Thunder

I went ahead and removed them from the main page, but the blog entries are still around. I still have copies of the 1080p trailers and will probably upload them to some file sharing site sometime soon. If I don’t, someone should ping me.

Anyway, I have no idea if they just expire after some time or if Apple removed them altogether at once. It could be that since it’s rated R for mature audience, they received complaints or what not and decided to no longer support them. If someone knows the real reason, I’d like to know.

Update: The 1080p versions of all 4 Red Band trailers have been reuploaded. See this post for more details.

I have no idea what’s wrong since Krunk4Ever.com runs on the same WordPress version and does unicode fine. I decided to try upgrading to WordPress 2.5.1, but the unicode problem still exist.

Searching online, I found WordPress, Unicode, and ‘?’s and it turns out Krunk4Ever.com’s wp-config.php was so old, it didn’t have the following defined:

define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define(’DB_COLLATE’, ”);

When I commented that out from HD-Trailer.net’s wp-config.php file, I was able to do unicode, but all my existing blog entries that had non-standard characters now became funky (white question mark inside a black diamond). There didn’t seem to be a simple search and replace where I could fix the problem. The underlying problem appears that when WordPress first created the database, the text data type it set as default was latin1 instead of utf8.

Searching a bit more, I found: Converting Database Character Sets on WordPress.org’s site. So a brief read revealed this is exactly what I wanted. I wanted to convert my existing latin1 text to utf8 text. So I jumped to the solution and start altering tables, which wasn’t as simple as it looks. Those …for all other tables/columns… really gets to you.

Half way through the process, I found that I screwed up. Apparently I was suppose to convert LONGTEXT to LONGBLOB, and not just BLOB. Guess I should’ve read all the instructions first. Thankfully, I had backed up my database as it instructed. And I guess I should’ve scrolled further as under solution was Conversion Scripts and Plugins. Grrrrr.

I installed the UTF-8 Database Converter plugin, read the readme.txt FULLY, activated the plugin and started the conversion. BAM! Everything works now. Even though there were big red warning signs saying this plugin was meant for 2.1-2.2, it worked on 2.3.1 and 2.5.1 w/o any problems.

Back to WordPress 2.5.1. The admin UI has completely changed. It’s definitely prettier, but I dislike the fact that they’ve moved a bunch of stuff I’ve been accustomed to the side (such as categories) to below the post. And since I run on a 1920×1080 resolution monitor, this is leaving about half my screen white, basically wasted space.

However I really appreciate the fact that Save no longer refreshes the page. Same with a bunch of other post editing functions.

Another awesome thing is that plugins now support updating from within the admin panel! No longer do I need to deactivate the plugin, download the plugin, overwrite the existing plugin, and reactivate it. In one click, it now goes fetches the plugin and automatically upgrades it on its own!

I wonder if they’ve supported upgrading WordPress like this yet…

Anyway, if I find anything more interesting, I’ll let you know!

Also, if you see any funky characters, please let me know too. Thanks!

I found many of AdBrite’s flash animation ads to be really annoying, so it wasn’t that difficult a decision to leave them. I still have the footer on AdBrite to compare it against the header which is now using Project Wonderful.

Some cool things about Project Wonderful include:

• A lot of tweaks (i.e. banner size, text/graphical ads, enable/disable animation, open in new/same window, colors, audience catering, etc.)
• Ad code that doesn’t necessary need to run JavaScript, so you can place it on RSS feeds.
• Nice and helpful customer support. Sent an email, got a reply 5 minutes later not with an automated response or someone who doesn’t even bother reading my email, but an actual human telling what I had to do.
• Once you’re approved, you can post ads on any site that you own. You don’t have to manually request for approval for additional sites.

I also heard about OpenX from my DreamHost newsletter (don’t worry, this site isn’t hosted on DreamHost). I’m not exactly sure how it works, but it sounds like another interesting ad server. If anyone knows about OpenX, please feel free to drop us a line telling us about it. Much appreciated.

I’ve been fooling around with ads, as you probably have noticed (unless of course you use AdBlocker). Anyway, I still don’t quite like the layout nor the annoying flashing gif animations. I’ll be experimenting with text only ads and see how they fare. Before you ask me why I’ve opted for AdBrite and not Google Adsense, lets just say that Google Adsense doesn’t like this site for some reason, as my application was rejected without any explanation.

The “All Trailers” link has been moved from the bottom of the index pages to the top to make it more discoverable.

I’ve also received many requests to add a search engine for this site. As always, you were able to search for trailers using the built-in WordPress search engine. I do have plans to write one up and even supporting auto-complete. However for now, I just added a search box in the upper right hand corner that does an in-site search of hd-trailers.net via Google.

Also, there has been a request to label trailers with genre tags, which I’ve begun to. I’ve just been copying genre information from IMDb and adding them to the category list.

As for finding out which trailers are the newest, I’ve suggested those who’ve emailed us to click on the little blue HD icon near the bottom which will return all the blog entries with the movie title in it. It’s sorted in reverse post order, so it help in determining which trailer is the newest.

There is a problem however. Due to the fact the main pages are automatically generated, certain pages are often delayed and not available when the blog entry is created. Therefore, I’ve added a little disclaimer: may not be up. I may decide to do some check later to see if the main trailer page is up.

I’ve also fixed up the trailer not found page and now it’ll redirect you back to the homepage.