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I am watching some quicktime apple trailers from the website they open up automatically in quicktime. How do I download it at that point. I am assuming that they are cached temporally somewhere. Any ideas?

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Pretty sure the cache is located in ~/Library/Caches/Quicktime Then the actual files are distributed in random folders (from 01, 02, 03, etc.). – cksum Jan 11 '12 at 3:39
Aren't trailers copyrighted material? – Richard Jan 11 '12 at 3:49
@Richard, no they aren't since you can download them directly with a single click. – Michiel Jan 11 '12 at 8:00
Thanks Michiel I've never downloaded them. My question remains, downloading for ease of personal viewing is one thing but I'm wondering if Apple/studios will mind if the videos get re-posted on other sites. Just because they're downloadable doesn't mean they're not copyrighted material with conditions for re-use. I don't know either way, just pointing out that not everything that's easily downloadable ought to be redistributed so quickly. – Richard Jan 11 '12 at 12:46
@Richard, I think the trailers are marked with the copyright disclaimer, so I guess you are free to use them... (but that's just a guess) – Michiel Jan 12 '12 at 9:01
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2 Answers

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You can download them directly from the website you know? Just hold down the button for a little longer and then you can select your download format!

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Open terminal and type lsof

This will list all of the files opened by all of your processes. The process playing the movie will either be Safari or QuickTimeHelper. The move file will be one of the last ones listed for that process and will have a large size. It will probably be in a "/tmp/" folder.

When you think you've found the right file, you can verify that it is a quicktime move by typing file "pathname" where pathname is the file path given in lsof. Assuming its actually a move file, you can then copy it by doing cp "pathname" ~/Desktop/mymovie.mov

There are a number of variations of the above instructions, depending on the type of file and what is actually playing it, but hopefully you get the idea.

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