HD-Trailers.net Blog » Download from Yahoo!

Download from Yahoo!

This tutorial was meant to teach you how to download HD Trailers from Yahoo! Movies.

NEW INSTRUCTIONS

Much easier to perform than previous instructions. For a preview, see my comment below.

Coming Soon…

OLD INSTRUCTIONS

Where to find the trailers:
You should be able find most of Yahoo! Movies HD Trailers on this page: High Definition Trailers (HD) on Yahoo! Movies, however the list isn’t updated as frequently and you may find some HD trailers on the Just Added list that’s not on this page.

What to do once you decide on the trailer and resolution you want:
Once you find the movie trailer you want and decide on a resolution, you’ll notice the link points to a qtl file, like this this link. You should be able to right click that link and save it to your hard disk. If you’re using a download utility such as wget or curl, you might get a blank file back. The problem is that there’s a referral url check, so you’ll need to define the referrer explicitly within the yahoo.com domain.
i.e. http://movies.yahoo.com/

How to read the redirection file:
Once you download this file and open it up in notepad or your favorite text editor, you’ll find an xml file which has an embedded source. The key thing you want from this source is the sid. In this case, the sid is 37208666.

How to download the actual trailer:
The final step is easy. The barebone URL you’ll need is:
http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?sdm=web&pt=rd&sid=

Append the sid you retrieved earlier from the qtl file to the url above, constructing a url that looks like this link. Once you have this link, you can open it in your browser and File > Save it or you can use a file download tool like wget or curl. This constructed link actually still gets redirected, but the redirection is needed to get the authentication code to allow you to download the video. Therefore, in some browsers (i.e Firefox) which shows the save file dialog before actually doing the redirection, you’ll be asked to save makeplaylist.dll, which you should just rename to movieName.mov and everything should be fine. On the other hand, browsers like IE7 that actually do the redirection before asking you to save the file, and you’ll be prompted to save something like 37208666.mov, which you can rename to better classify the file.

With wget and curl, you actually get a lot of gibberish in the filename, but since you’re using wget and curl, I’m assuming you’re advanced enough to know what to do with the downloaded file afterwards.

35 Responses to “Download from Yahoo!”

Krunk4Ever! » Blog Archive » How to download HD Trailers from Apple.com sent a pingback on July 4, 2007

[...] I’ve also added instructions to download HD trailers from Yahoo! Movies: Tutorial: Download from Yahoo! [...]

Gregory wrote a comment on October 8, 2007

Great tutorial, but I’m having a hard time finding the “sid number”.
Once I right click on the desired movie resolution what i get is
http://us.rd.yahoo.com/movies/hdtrailers/hdpage/ironman/1080/?http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/process/qtlHD.qtl?node_id=4097727&hdtype=1080p
There is no “sid” number there, Am I missing something? please help,

Gregg

Krunk wrote a comment on October 8, 2007

Right click the link and click “Save Target As”. Save the file onto your desktop and then open it up with Notepad. You will then find the SID in that file.

Gregory wrote a comment on October 8, 2007

Mr. Krunk dude, thanks for answering so quickly, but I did that already. The file that is saved has 0kb, zero, nada, zip, no “sid” to be found, nothing to look at or analyze or… you get the point!

Krunk wrote a comment on October 8, 2007

Interesting… It appears to be a problem with IE. You see, those links have referral detection and if the referral isn’t within yahoo.com’s domain, they redirect you away. Firefox appears to be sending the referral URL when saving the file, but IE doesn’t appear to do so.

I’d recommend trying a different browser or having a download utility to do this.

Gregory wrote a comment on October 8, 2007

Thanks dude, I’ll try that later on, need to get some zzz’s first, save up some energy since TOday is my B’day…

Sweetnothing wrote a comment on November 28, 2007

What about downloading trailers that do not have the “other formats”? Where do you get the SID?

Krunk wrote a comment on November 28, 2007

RE: Sweetnothing

Unfortunately the default videos aren’t standardized in any particular way that I know of and can be using a wide variety of codecs/video players: flash, wmv, mov, etc.

If I find some time, I might take a look into it and see if there’s a way to get that file. If the file you want is flash, you can easily look in your Firefox cache and the most recent large file (over 1MB) typically is what you’re looking for. Just rename it to *.flv

Krunk wrote a comment on November 29, 2007

Actually, I took a look at it and it’s actually not that complicated. Take a look at this url. You can get the URL on the trailers page located in the shortcut link underneath “Video Title”.

Once you copied the link/shortcut, break them apart based on the comma (,) into:

5212998-700-wmv-s.50446002-
5212998-1000-flash-s.50446019-
5212998-300-wmv-s.50445999-
5212998-100-flash-s.50446013-
5212998-300-flash-s.50446015-
5212998-1000-wmv-s.50446007-
5212998-100-wmv-s.50445995-
5212999-6800-qtv-s.50446032-
5212999-2700-qtv-s.50446025-
5212999-10300-qtv-s.50446038

Do note these are all the different formats available and are read like this:
VideoID-Bitrate-VideoType-s.SID

For example, the first one would be:
Video ID: 5212998
Bitrate: 700kbps
Video Type: wmv
SID: 50446002

It even has the HD versions in that list. So all you have to do is determine the format you want, get the SID, and append it to the URL I provided above.

Sweetnothing wrote a comment on January 22, 2008

It seems that this only works for trailers with the “other formats” listed. If you look at a recent one, you cannot get the URL on the trailers page located in the shortcut link underneath “Video Title”. It gives you a much shorter URL without the SID. Can you advise?

Krunk wrote a comment on January 22, 2008

That’s correct. The ones without the “other formats” means an HD trailer is not available for that particular movie/clip, therefore there is no SID for you to use to get the HD trailer.

Similarly, not all trailers on Apple’s site have HD versions either. I believe it depends on the studios to make one available.

Melinda wrote a comment on February 7, 2008

I’m having a problem using IDM. It downloads a major part and then gets stuck. If I cancel it and start again, it requests for a password. I can use the normal Firefox downloader but that is very slow:-) I don’t have this problem when downloading from Apple. On another topic, is it the same process for downloading other than trailers e.g. super bowl spots? I saw some more on yahoo but have to do more experimenting on getting the right download link….

Krunk wrote a comment on February 7, 2008

I’m assuming IDM is some download manager. I’ve also hit problems while using dTa (DownThemAll!), but I believe restricting it to a lower number of simultaneous downloads fixed that problem.

Downloading HD Super Bowl Spots is the same process. My automated scripts appear to still work with those, so I believe there’s no change. Of course if you take a look at the new instructions, they’re much easier to do.

joey wrote a comment on March 16, 2008

I am using firefox v. 2.0.0.12. Firefox has a ’save page as’ option only. When saving the .mov file it is only 1k in size, not the full file.

Krunk wrote a comment on March 16, 2008

RE: joey

If you right click the link, there should be a “Save Link As…”

“Save Page As…” only shows up if the think you right clicked was text or white space area.

Brian wrote a comment on March 30, 2008

I am trying to write a small tool in c# to go to the apple/aol/yahoo pages and download the 720p trailers in the background so they’ll just magically appear for me on my server (I then have Tivo automatically xfer them so I can view on my TV, but anyways…)

The problem I have is I keep getting a 404 error when browsing to the http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?sdm=web&pt=rd&sid=######## url.

I thought maybe it was that yahoo knew it wasn’t a real browser, so I added headers to make it appear like IE. Still didn’t work, so I added a referer header. This didn’t fix it either. Any ideas? I’m open a completely different solution as well if one exists.

Krunk wrote a comment on March 30, 2008

Hmmmm. I’m not exactly sure why… Have you tried passing a working URL (one which you’ve downloaded before) directly into your C# app and see if it works?

I’ve used wget and curl to download from Yahoo! before and both seem to work fine. Maybe you can execute a wget command from within your C# app as a last resort.

Brian wrote a comment on March 30, 2008

I must be doing something wrong:

C:\Storage\Apps\curl-7.18.0>curl –referer “http://movies.yahoo.com/” “http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?sdm=web&pt=rd&sid=61270240″

results in a 404, as did my wget test.

BTW, the URL is the one for Mongrol. Worked with a save-as in IE. Are you able to use wget/curl now or before yahoo made their changes?

Krunk wrote a comment on March 30, 2008

I think I found your problem. You’re using & in your URL, which actually gets decoded into & when you save it through a web browser.

The & is actually a special character that needs to be encoded to be html friendly.

Brian wrote a comment on March 30, 2008

Thanks!! That was it. When I had my script scraping the URLs from the source, the &amp was there so it’d look right when viewed with a browser. I’ve removed all the “amp”s and it worked great.

Thanks Again.

Metalhead666 wrote a comment on June 24, 2008

Hi, thanks for all the great tutorials.. But for now i’ll stick to the links converted by u..

U rock man..

Ur blog is the best source for new and latest HD trailers.. Thanks a lot man..

karim wrote a comment on July 4, 2008

Hey guys when i download a trailer from yahoo i can only get to a certain point ~3Mb then it freezes. It happens with IE and FlashGet as well as Orbit the two download programs i use. But with these two if i pause and then resume it countinues then stops again at around ~6 Mb. I could do this till the trailer is finished but i can’t sit 45 minutes at night just to pause and resume. BTW the Orbit program can do 77 Mb then stop and have to repeat the process.
What can i do to solve this problem.

Krunk wrote a comment on July 4, 2008

Weird. I know Yahoo trailers have problems with download accelerators, but it should work fine with just the standard IE right click > Save as.

I assume Orbit is also another download accelerator like Flashget which allows you to download multiple parts of the file simultaneously to download faster.

As noted earlier, Yahoo trailers have problems with download accelerators.

If you set the download accelerator to only do 1 connection at a time, it should work. If not, try a different browser like Firefox or download tool such as wget.

karim wrote a comment on July 4, 2008

Ok thanks i will try that

karim wrote a comment on July 6, 2008

Yeah it worked with Firefox Thanks for the Help Guys.

LRFalk01 wrote a comment on August 5, 2008

I made a little C# app where you can put the yahoo movie id into a command and it will spit back the SIDs for clips.

Download here: lucas.myfalk.com\YahooClips.zip

For the movie Wanted:
http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809878244/video
Command: YahooClips.exe 1809878244 > C:/Clips.txt

contents of created Clips.txt file:

fred wrote a comment on September 12, 2008

is there a link with all the trailers or should I say One big file with most of the trailers so I don’t have to download each one individually

thanks
great site

Krunk wrote a comment on September 12, 2008

Unfortunately no. The closest thing I can see happening is a bittorrent file created with all the trailers and having people share. You can try using DTA (DownThemAll - extension on firefox) do it on a per page basis.

Pendor wrote a comment on September 17, 2008

Thanks for the info!

I’ve just wrote a small script to simplify the process:

http://www.pendor.com.ar/apps/hd

sa wrote a comment on September 26, 2008

I’m trying to download a clip, but having problems. The url seems to be different than for trailers. Any ideas?

sa wrote a comment on September 26, 2008

An example I’m talking about is here:
http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1808744930/video#3449876

Krunk wrote a comment on September 26, 2008

The example you provided has no HD trailers…

sa wrote a comment on September 26, 2008

Oh yeah, I just wanted to download them anyway. Any ideas?