This tutorial was meant to teach you how to download HD Trailers from Apple.

Where to find the trailers:
You should be able find most of Apple HD Movie Trailers on this page: Apple – Movie Trailers – Just HD. However, old trailers tend to get knocked off this list, at which point your best bet would be your favorite search engine or this blog.

What to do once you decide on the trailer and resolution you want:
Once you find the movie trailer you want, click on the poster, followed by the High Definition link. Some movie trailers have custom pages which make it difficult to find the real download link to the trailer. The easiest way to determine if you’re on the correct page or not is by looking at the URL. If the URL ends in /hd/, you’re on the correct page. If not, try appending /hd/ after the last / (removing the file if exist at the end of the URL).

For example, Ratatouille is one of the recent movie trailers that does have a custom page. Clicking on the poster takes you to this page. Notice how there’s no High Definition link and clicking on the resolutions directly bring up the movie trailer. If you append /hd/ to this URL, you’ll end up on this page, which is what most Apple HD trailer pages would look like. It appears that if a trailer has an HD version, this page will exist, even if a custom page has been made.

Once you decide on the resolution you want, you want to view the source of this page. To view the source in Internet Explorer, on the file menu, click View -> Source. You can also right click in a blank area on the page and click View Source. To view the source in Firefox, on the file menu, click View -> Page Source. The faster way (which I do) is CTRL+U. Right clicking on the page and clicking View Page Source also works.

How to find and construct the download URL:
Once you have the source opened, do a text search for the resolution you want (i.e. 480p, 720p, 1080p). For each trailer on that page, you’ll most likely find there’s 1 or 2 hits which are part of a bigger link which points to the following:

• Button – the button generally has hd_btn2 before the resolution
• Reference file – the reference file usually has a variation of the word trailer or teaser before the resolution.

Once you have the reference file link of the trailer and resolution you want, you’ll need to modify it a bit. You want to insert an ‘h‘ between the ‘_’ and resolution. For example, the file in the reference file link above was “ratatouille-tlr2_1080p.mov”. After you insert the ‘h’, it’ll become “ratatouille-tlr2_h1080p.mov” forming this new link.

How to download the actual trailer:
The final step is easy. You’ve already got the direct link to the actual HD trailer. You can now open it in your browser and File > Save it or you can use a file download tool like wget or curl.