Apple verkauft Musik Videos?!

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One blog (Wysz's Thoughts) points out that Apple's iTunes Music store now appears to offer the ability to sell videos as well as songs. This takes advantage of iTunes 4.8 new features allowing it to manage and play video files.

This feature is demonstrated in the Feel Good Inc single (iTunes Link) which was used in the most recent iPod Ad (Rollerskating).

The videos for this particular artist are provided with the album purchase only and are not available for individual purchase. Purchasing the album provides you with 4 short .mp4 videos. These particular videos are 480x272 pixels, 30FPS with 44kHz audio.

These videos are simply animated shorts rather than music videos - and in this particular instance - do not utilize any Digital Rights Management.

Update: Other videos included with an album:

The Antidote by Morcheeba ($9.90 for 10 songs, 1 video)
Warning Shots by Thievery Corporation ($1.98 for 1 song and 1 video which is 27MB, 480x360).
Stand Up by Dave Matthews Band ($11.99 for 14 songs, 1 video, 1 PDF)

At this point, videos appear to be "extras" to provide incentives for customers to purchase full albums. Apple does not appear to be selling videos individually at this time. Similarly, Apple offers PDF Booklets for some other album purchases (ex: In Between Dreams by Jack Johnson).

Of interest, the Warning Shots' Video adds a $.99 premium to get both the song and video ($1.98 total). Meanwhile, the Warning Shots song is available by itself for $.99.

Shaggy-AlienfoodDas tun sie schon lange, nur konnte man sich die Videos vor QT7 einfach so aus dem Cache fischen .

Falls es jemanden Interessiert, der neue Speicherort der Filme ist
/private/var/tmp/folders.501/TemporaryItems/QT1509971652-414-794cdd9d-53c69b35-6ec2a987-bb44d8f5-316d6f78

Allerdings kann (nach dem umbenennen in bla.mov) weder der Quicktime-Player noch der VLC etwas mit dieser Datei anfangen. Anscheinend wird sie Verschlüsselt. Wenn man sie sich im Editor ansieht ist auch kein üblicher Header zu finden.
Es muss also jemand einen "Decoder" für diese Dateien schreiben um sie brauchbar zu machen.

Versuch es mal damit

Bypass iTunes's new format of caching movies by creating your own application in Automator.

Way back when you still used Panther, you may remember when you could go on the iTMS (iTunes Music Store), load a movie, and then go search for the QTPluginTemp file and grab it out. As you might have already discovered, this little trick doesn't work so well anymore. iTunes now saves the movies in quicktime cache files which aren't read quite as easily.

There is however a plus side to this. It now appears that you can revisit a movie you have previously loaded on iTMS, and it will be still be fully loaded. Previously, you would have to load the movies every time you visited them.

Luckily, someone over at macosxhints.com posted a script that grabs the direct URL for the video and loads it in Safari. Still, I ran into problems in that the file could not be saved. I was left with a tiny 16 KB file which of course Quicktime rejects.

Looking back at the script, I tried to think of some way I could bypass loading the movie in Safari and directly download the file. Then it came to me. Why not try out Automator, Tiger's new automation assistant, at the same time?

It turned out to be extremely easy and an almost perfect solution to boot. It's so simple, even a Longhorn could do it! Well ok, that's stretching it. If you're feeling super lazy, you can just skip to the end and download the final product.