The Download Munkey : Finder of Things …

The previous post was for downloading trailers from Yahoo! Movies. This one is for Apple’s Movie Trailers

I’m using the Transformers trailers @ Apple’s Movie Trailers as an example here. Below is a brief step-by-step guide on saving the trailer to your harddisk for offline viewing

1. Go to the trailer page for your favourite movie

2. View the source in your browser of choice and search for .mov. Sometimes there may be more than one match - ignore the ones with words like btn which are the animated movie clips and not the metadata for the actual trailers (usually with words and numbers like e.g 480p, 640, tlr, etc)

   If you see something like QT_WriteOBJECT_XHTML when searching for .mov, you should be able to download the trailer

3. Copy the URL which should look like http://images.apple.com/movies/dreamworks/transformers/transformers-tsr1_h.640.mov and paste into your download manager or browser.
4. Save the above file and open in a text editor like Notepad.
5. Search for .mov again. You should see something like transformers-tsr1_h640w.mov which is the actual video filename. (See image below)
6. Join the URL (sans filename) in 3. and 5. to get http://images.apple.com/movies/dreamworks/transformers/transformers-tsr1_h640w.mov which is the actual trailer URL for download.

NOTE: Not all HD trailers cannot be downloaded by the above method I will write more on that soon after I figure out how to download the HD version of that bloody exclusive featurette for Pirates of the Caribbean 3

UPDATE:For exceptions like for the Pirates of the Caribbean 3 featurette, you need to look into the associated Javascript files in the source first (in this case it’s js/hd.js, infer the link to the Quicktime metadata file (hint: ….piratesofthecaribbean3-fte_720p.mov) and follow the steps above starting from step 3 to get your 120+ MB featurette.

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY
How to download Transformers Exclusive Trailer from Yahoo! Movies

I usually download movie trailers from Apple’s Movie Trailers (Transformers @ Apple’s Movie Trailers) because I can achieve a higher download speed but the upcoming Transformers movie has one exclusive HD trailer @ Yahoo! Movies that is not available elsewhere on the .NET, as well as all the other trailers in their full HD glory.

My Opera browser doesn’t have the Quicktime player needed for viewing the trailer @ Yahoo! Movies and besides, I prefer to watch the trailer offline than attempt to stream a 100+ MB 720×480 HD video.

After clicking on 720p (or 480p or 1080p) for the Exclusive Trailer, we are asked to save this .qtl file if the Quicktime player is not installed (if it is installed, right click and save the .qtl file instead.)

Open the .qtl file in a text editor and search for embed src=. Copy the entire text until a double quote is found - the copied text should be something like http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?…. Paste this URL into your browser or download manager and enjoy

Some stills from the Exclusive Trailer to keep you busy while waiting for the download to complete I like the part where Starscream transforms - couldn’t capture that part though

© Dreamworks SKG

Megatron on ice

© Dreamworks SKG

Bonecrusher on fire

© Dreamworks SKG

Optimus Prime does gymnastics :p

After watching this trailer several times, I think I rather watch 1986’s original The Transformers : The Movie instead - I like the original design for Megatron a lot more

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Transformers Comics Desktop Wallpapers

I love digging for interesting stuff on the .NET (Actually I spend more time digging up stuff than reading or writing about them nowadays :p)

Below is a collection of my thoughts on the various methods I use to find interesting sites (not necessarily blogs) on the .NET. The entire article is intended to be more of an personal opinion than a comprehensive analysis so there may be some wrong assumptions and mistakes here and there. You’ve been warned

MyBlogLog
The social networking/blogging site known as MyBlogLog is a pretty good way to find interesting blogs - but only if you take the time to sift through the tons of blogs registered there (known as communities at MyBlogLog) - I don’t like to read purely money-making blogs and there seems to be a LOT of these blogs in MyBlogLog

For each user, you can view the blogs that he/she authors (under Sites and Blogs I Author) as well as the blogs that he/she is interested in (My Communities). The My Communities is usually a good way to find blogs related to the content of the blogs that a MyBlogLog user authors (sometimes)

However I find the navigation on Mybloglog quite tedious, requiring 2 clicks to view a single blog - click to view an user profile, look through his/her communities and click again to view the actual actual blogs. The same thing happens when I want to visit the blogs in the communities that I joined, click once to view the community before clicking again to view the actual blog. Arrrggh!

The community search feature works by searching the titles of the blogs - there’s no tagging so it’s pretty much a hit-and-miss affair.

My preferred method is to randomly click on avatars that stand out from the crowd and then cross my fingers :p Normally I can find one related to my interests per 10 to 15 users If I find one that that I like, I can view their My Communities section and hopefully find even more blogs on similiar topics.

You can see My Communities @ here. As you can see, there isn’t a good way to organize your communities

Digg
Digg is also another good source of links to some pretty cool stuff on the .NET but only IF you have the time to patiently look through the multiple duplicates of the same news items as well the enormous quantity of newly dugg content in Upcoming Stories per day. The short blurb accompanying each dugg entry allows you to quickly scan though the entries though.

Personally I have given up on monitoring the upcoming stories and use the search feature instead (which is pretty good but slow at times).

My diggs here (usually from the Gaming section). As you can see I haven’t been digging for a long time

Technorati
Technorati boasts the world’s biggest database of blogs but I haven’t had any success with finding stuff via its search engine - maybe my keywords are too generic. I tend to look for more obscure stuff so the top searches and tags are useless for me.

The method I use is to search for a blog that you actually read before and browse through the other blogs that link to that particular blog, to find related blogs. the favourites feature is a nifty feature but due to the small minority of bloggers who actually keep track of their favourites in their Technorati profile, it’s not that useful in real life.

Meta-Blogs e.g Ping.sg
Meta-blogs specific to your country or city are also an excellent source for finding bloggers with similiar interests. As meta-blogs cater to bloggers of a specific locality, there’s the added bonus of finding interesting local stuff which is sometimes pretty hard to find via search engines on the .NET.

I regularly visit Ping.sg, which is a meta-blog for err … SG blogs. The community is still relatively small enough (but growing rapidly) so that I can preview every single post submitted to ping.sg without spending too much time. I estimate the most posts submitted to ping.sg per day is around 150 which takes me maybe 20 minutes to check the latest posts before I start working every morning.

del.ici.ous & Stumbleupon
There’re also social bookmarking sites like del.ici.ous which I don’t use much because of the searching feature - it isn’t that useful because users can name and tag their bookmarks with whatever tags they feel like using which makes searching quite tricky.

There’s also the newer social bookmarking site Stumbleupon where bookmarked sites can have reviews which makes searching much easier than del.ici.ous. Unfortunately their Stumble feature which randomly redirects you to sites of your interest doesn’t support my Opera browser so I haven’t been visiting Stumbleupon that regularly

Blogger
Sometimes, clicking the prev and next buttons on the Blogger Navbar for Blogger users helps too..

When searching for wallpapers and artwork for non-English games or for those games originally developed in non-English speaking countries, I sometimes encounter official sites which do not have an English version or a bare-minimal English site.

To prevent myself from randomly clicking on buttons and links everytime, I compiled a short list of useful words I learned while downloading wallpapers from the Game Workshop sites and other game and software sites around the world Hope it saves you time when downloading stuff

Finding the Download Section

Swedish - bakgrundsbilder (corrected 31 Mar 2008 thanks to Hans Rosenberg )

I don’t guarantee that all the words listed are correct because I don’t understand any of the languages above except Chinese. The equivalents for wallpapers in many languages is especially tricky because they do not necessarily use a literal translation of ‘wallpaper’ when referring to wallpapers e.g the German word Bildschirmhintergründe translates to ’screen background’ in English (according to Google Translate again).

For images, I recommend using Google Image Search to find them before resorting to using keywords in a specific language. It’s a lot faster that way although using keywords in other languages in Google Search can often yield some quality links that you may not see in the Google Search Results when purely searching in English.

Please leave a comment if there’s any inaccuracies in the words or if there’s additional words you would like to add to the list.

Also check out my previous post on some ideas on searching for Japanese game wallpapers.

Tags: Technology Wallpapers

Recently visited the old official Rumble Roses website but couldn’t find any wallpapers on the site. There was however an interesting section titled Exclusives - probably with wallpapers However you had to enter the first song title in the Music Credits section on page 38 of the game manual to enter the Exclusives section. No PS2, no Rumble Roses manual, time to do some reverse-engineering

If you’re just interested in downloading the wallpapers, please feel free to scroll to the bottom of this post.

I downloaded Flasm, a free Flash ActionScript disassembler (see my previous post on Flasm). I then downloaded the correct SWF at http://www.konami-data.com/officialsites/rumbleroses/flash/rr_level700.swf to disassemble. To download a SWF file, view the HTML source and use a download manager like FlashGet or simply use the Tools > Advanced > Cache in Opera and right-click the desired file (I love Opera!)

I dragged and dropped the downloaded file onto Flasm.exe which produced a text file with a .flm extension. This .flm file contains the disassembled ActionScript bytecode of the Flash file as plaintext (No resources of course).

Since the code for each menu item e.g Exclusives, Screens, Press, etc is in its own SWF file, I assumed that the correct answer would load another SWF. Searching for “.swf” in the flm gave three results - rr_level798.swf, rr_level799.swf, rr_level800.swf.

Appending “rr_level799.swf” to “http://www.konami-data.com/officialsites/rumbleroses/flash/” - the path of the disassembled Flash SWF, redirects to the Exclusives wallpapers page. Yay! rr_level800.swf gives an Exclusive Movies page and rr_level798.swf gives a Coming Soon page.

When I try downloading the wallpapers, Opera doesn’t show the popup window with the wallpaper image. I hate Opera. More reversing needed

Anyway, to cut the whole story short, I downloaded rr_level799.swf, did some searching and further disassembly of associated SWF files and finally found the wallpapers - Not that great by the way either

Two out of the eleven wallpapers available (Reiko Hinomoto, Dixie Clemets, Aisha, Evil Rose)

© Konami

If you want to download the wallpapers directly from Konami’s site, you’ll have to do some work and reverse engineer the ActionScript yourself If not, you can always download them through www.flickr.com as someone had already uploaded them to flickr.com back in 2004.

Almost similiar wallpapers in lower resolutions (1024×768 and 1280×960) are available from Rumble Roses JP site.