Weirdness with Apple’s movie trailers site iTunes links

I’m trying to download movie trailers from Apple.com, and it’s behaving oddly. I’ve tried four different browsers (Chrome Beta 2.0.x, Firefox 3.0, Firefox 3.1b3, and IE8), and they all do the same, so I’m thinking it’s the Apple.com trailers site that’s busted. This did work last weekend…

I subscribe to Apple’s latest movie trailers RSS feed. This feed includes links to the each movie on the Apple.com movie trailers site. As an example, let’s look at the trailer site for Food, Inc.

Instead of watching the trailer online, I prefer to download it into iTunes to watch later. To do this, I click on the “For your iPod” link on the trailer site (sometimes it’s “For your iPhone” if they’re trying to be c00l). For Food, Inc. this link is:

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/redirect?url=itms://www.apple.com/moviesxml/s/magnolia/foodinc/trailer.xml%3Fi%3D17

When I click on that link, my browser gets a HTTP 302 redirect to:

http://ax.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/com.apple.jingle.app.store.DirectAction/storeFront

That URL generates an XML file that I suspect may be for iTunes to consume, but are being sent to the browser instead. Here’s the XML:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no" ?>
  <Document xmlns="http://www.apple.com/itms/">
    <Include value="7.2" property="iTunes version" comparison="lt" url="http://ax.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/legacyViewGrouping?id=38" />
    <Include value="7.2" property="iTunes version" comparison="ge" url="http://ax.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/modernViewGrouping?id=38" />
  </Document>

I suspect that either the itms:// URL is supposed to actually be sent to my browser – when I paste it directly into IE8 or Firefox it does prompt to open iTunes, though Chrome beta doesn’t – or there’s a missing Content-Type header somewhere. Hopefully Apple will fix this, though given past issues I’ve seen with their Trailers site (sometimes the RSS feed doesn’t update for weeks or months, sometimes you click on a link and the trailer isn’t actually there, etc) I don’t think it’s particularly a priority for them.

In the mean time, I can just grab the itms:// URL from each “For your iPod” links and paste it into IE or Firefox browser, but it’s not exactly straight-forward, especially since I’m using Chrome as much as possible these days.

Update Apr 23, 2009: finally got a chance to check back on this, and it’s fixed. Yay!