Video Man, I love Mac OS X. Kudos to the Mac developers, too. They’re clever. We love the music videos from the iTunes Music Store, right? Wouldn’t it be great to be able to save them on your Mac? Now you can. Free.

One of the benefits of being a macaholic is an abundance of RSS applications for Mac OS X. RSS lets me find out more of what’s going on with more Mac sites, applications, news, people, events, and secrets, and do it in a fraction of time. Today you’ll reap one of the rewards for that effort.

Do you like music videos? You know, the kind you see on VH1 and MTV. Hundreds of the latest music videos are also available on the iTunes Music Store. For viewing and listening only.

While most web delivered QuickTime movies will give you the option of saving the movie to your hard drive, that’s not the case with the music videos on the iTunes Music Store. The option’s not there.

The best item I came across from today’s 400 news items and 50 web sites has to do with finding and saving those QuickTime music videos on your Mac. This took a couple of steps but you’ll benefit from the effort.

First, I found a bulletin board thread with the heading, “Topic: Inspiration and magically downloading movies” on EmotionDV, a Calgary, Canada Final Cut Pro users group.

The writer went through a step-by-step instruction on how to use iTunes Music Store and the Finder to find and save the QuickTime movies used in iTMS’ music videos. Slick. Now I could watch and listen to the music video as it played on iTunes, then I could save it to my Mac and play it back later.

Interested? I thought you would like this. The only real problem was just how cumbersome it was to save those music videos. Finding them was easy, but it was a multiple step process to get them saved. Here’s the instructions from the thread and author Duane:

“There is no “Download” option when you view the video on the iTunes music store? Well, maybe not but…

The video actually downloads to your computer in order for you to watch it. And if you want to watch it again (and again, and again) from your computer, all you need to do is find it, and save it. Here is how:

First, let the video play all the way through, but don’t close the window when done;

In the Finder, go to the menu bar and select File > Find (Cmd-F);

Change the criteria to search for Visibility > Invisible Items and add a second criteria by clicking the “+” sign and set that to Date Created > is Today;

Click that search button;

In the resulting Search Results dialogue box, select the column header Date Modified and make sure the sorting triangle is pointed down (i.e. newest to oldest files);

Somewhere near the top of the list you will see a file named something like (but not exactly like) this, “QTPluginTemp1283465”. Drag that file to your Desktop;

Now rename that file to something a little more appropriate and include the QuickTime extension. In my example, I named the U2 video “U2Vertigo.mov”. Place the newly created movie file somewhere you can find it when you need a bit of a “pick-me-up”.

“Well, guess what? It worked great. Except for all those steps. Bah, humbug.”Sounds simple enough, right? Well, guess what? It worked great. Except for all those steps. Bah, humbug. Reading the board thread to the bottom gave me the “one click” solution.

Second, download I Get Movies instead of following all those steps above. Basically, I Get Movies will, well, it’ll get the movies for you. No Finder search needed.

All you need to do is open I Get Movies from djodjodesign. Then open iTunes. Go to the music video section, find a video you like. Click it and let it play through to the end. Then, click the “Gotcha” button on I Get Movies.

You’re done. I Get Movies automatically finds the cache file of the QuickTime music video, moves it to the desktop, then renames it. You can change the name of the music video to whatever you like.

One click. Gotcha. Music video library here I come.

Is that sweet, or what?

Final Cut Pro user Duane provided this note: “Just a reminder that you should not distribute files created this way by any means. That would most certainly be in conflict of intellectual property rights, etc. And as a “content creator”, you know that just isn’t right.” Ditto.

One click music videos. Click Here for the download page. Oh, brush up on your French. Or, is Greek?

One more thing. We’ve opened a topic on Tera and Bambi’s Mac360 forums about music videos. Click Here to view.

Check out the daily list of our 9 Word mini-Reviews at NoodleMac, and Kate's daily in-depth Mac software reviews at PixoBebo.

• Article by Tera Patricks • Published on Thursday, October 21, 2004
• Category: What's New • 0 Reader comment(s) • Email This • Digg This • Shop Now

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