Apple has decided to block streaming content from http://apple.com/trailers/ for Linux users. I say this because tonight I went to view a few of the upcoming movie trailers and was told to “Get the Latest Quicktime” in order to watch and I was denied the ability to watch them.

I hit the forums to see if others have the same problems that I have and I’ve found that many people have begun reporting the problem from around May of this year. Not being one to give up, I decided to test things a bit to see what apple.com was doing.

I installed the useragent switcher on Firefox and switched my agent to Windows Vista and IE7. I then watched headers as apple once again denied me despite my agent being accepted by it. It seems that it is looking for an actual install of Quicktime on your system (I can’t tell you for sure, I just know that useragent isn’t what it is sniffing for).

How does one circumvent? Pretty simple. When you are given that denied message “Get the Latest Quicktime”, go to View >> Page Source. Look for a URL that ends in .mov. Copy that URL and paste it into a new tab. That’s it, you’re now watching the trailer.

I want to thank Apple for being exclusionary to Linux users when you benefit so greatly from Open Source software. It sets a great example and shows what is really important to you as a company…and that is forcing your software onto everyone similar to Microsoft.

UPDATE: I wanted to let everyone know my platform since everyone seems to think I’m silly enough to blog about this without installing the proper codecs. I use PCLinuxOS 2007 as my main workhorse distro. The apple trailers site worked for me previously until I recently checked it. I’ve updated this

to current and have all codecs installed (w32codecs, mplayer, xine,

gstreamer, etc.). I have uninstalled, reinstalled, and tweaked

everything I can think of tweaking to get this working. Nothing thus

far works. I should note that this is with Firefox 3 and I’m not sure

if that has anything to do with things.

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