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Star Wars Prequels Media Movies

Higher Res Prequel Trailer (and Quicktime 4) 131

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-download dept.
Shishigami writes "Apple has released the latest Star Wars trailer at a higher resolution - 640 pixels wide. They probably figured it was the best way to get people to download Quicktime 4.0. My favorite is the requirement for playback - a 300mhz G3, or a 400mhz Pentium II. " I bet my 400mhz P2 won't play the trailer.
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Higher Res Prequel Trailer (and Quicktime 4) More

Higher Res Prequel Trailer (and Quicktime 4)

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  • Celeron 300A (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It worked just fine on my Celeron 300A. It took a long time to download even with my cable modem. That movies is going to be great!

  • Well (Score:1)

    by Roland ( 61 )
    Lucas already suggested that ;)

  • Well (Score:1)

    by drwiii ( 434 )
    I think they should just stop concentrating on making Star Wars movies and put all their time into making trailers. They can charge $2 extra for admission to every movie that has the trailer, there you go!
  • I can't get it to save to disk, it always opens with the stupid pluggin. How did you do it?
  • Posted by Ydeologi:

    Does anybody have a mirror to the 640x480 Star Wars trailer, so I can download it and play it later rather than load it thru a plugin?

    Thanks.
  • Here's the link [apple.com].

    Just right click on the above, and save as...

  • Works fine on my 233MHz G3.

  • What registration key...

    I installed last night with no registration at all... got the editors version too

    I thought it was just because it was a beta version?

  • I just copied the link to the clipboard, and Gozillagrabbed the file for me!

    http://www.gozilla.com
  • If you Linux kids want to hear the full stereo sound of the trailer, get xmovie from

    http://heroine.tampa.fl.us/xmovie

    and a Linuxised trailer from

    ftp://heroine.tampa.fl.us/pub/starwars_flattened .mov
  • I dunno about you, but my SGI (using Irix, none of that NT here) gives me telepathic abilities.

    For instance I have precognative powers. I can accurately predict that my system will work more reliably than win98. I also have telepathic abilities at certain resturants; I enter and immediately my sixth sense tells me that I'm going to enjoy a good meal.

    So says Criswell. ;)

  • 640? (Score:1)

    by crimsun ( 4771 )
    mirrored on my Linux-Mandrake 5.3 box here [152.2.95.222].

  • One of the other guys here already had an earlier beta of QT4 installed on one of our Macs. When I went to view the trailer, I got a message about missing a required codec, and a link to download it. Of course it couldn't get the codec through our proxy setup.

    The movie stopped downloading and showed up as a blank in the browser. However, I clicked it, it started downloading again, and it played fine (!?) It even streamed, though of course the quality was pretty sad, since this is an old 7200 with a 604e/200 -- way short of the quoted G3/300. I'm sure it will be acceptable on any G3, but they say 300 for really perfect playback. It's also perfectly smooth on my PBG3/250 with QT3, but ditto on the lack of sound. Movies also tend to play back much better in MoviePlayer than in the browser plug-in, even when it's a local file.

    By the way, what sort of new codec is this? It must be pretty good -- the file is hardly any bigger than the 480-pixel version. Must be why it requires this kind of CPU speed.

    David Gould
  • The "stub installer" approach sucks. Sure, I installed it at work, but now I have to download the whole thing again (over a modem) to install at home.

    And the "stub installer" doesn't even give me a
    chance to "save" the downloaded components.

    So, I made some packet traces on the download the installer makes; both for "basic" (2MB) and custom/full (it claims 18MB, but only downloads 7Mb). This download technology is, like most things Apple, bizarre and non-standard.

    Everything it grabs (for Windows 95/98/NT) comes from http://starwars.apple.com/us/win/. First it grabs the viseicat.idx file (1KB) and then it grabs all *or* some of the 7MB vicedata.dat file. All of the requests include in the HTTP headers this:

    Authorization: Basic cXR3aW46cXRyb3g0dQ==

    which works out to a username:password of qtwin:qtrox4u. However, I was able to fetch these without the authorization!

    A custom/full download got the visedata.dat file
    with this range:

    Range: bytes=32300-7086322

    while a "basic" download started with this range:

    Range: bytes= 770138-882640

    (although I didn't trace the whole download, so I expect it grabbed several chunks of the 7MB file).


    Either way, the downloaded file (visedata.dat) is all data and consumed by their installer.

    This means that I can't possibly download the "whole" distribution at work and carry it home on a ZIP disk or a laptop, because the downloaded files aren't usable without going through their installer.

    Like I said, this is exactly the type of stunt I expect from Apple.
  • My 36 processor SGI Challenge server didn't even have to be powered up to watch the movie, so there!

    And whats the use of having Dual Pentium 3's when your running Windows 98? Judging by the intelligence of your post, Windows 98 would possibly be too much of an advanced operating system for you...

    I think an anonymous coward said it best when he said "STFU".
  • Perhaps CmdrTaco was referring to the OS on his box. I sure wish apple would release this for unix/linux.. I guess that osX will help them broaden their release platforms eventually...

  • I'm a bit surprised that Apple released QT4 so quickly, considering how long it was between QT2 and QT3.

    Another plus is the artists showcase [apple.com], if only for the inclusion of some really cool vids (the Marillion video's quite nice if you like Radiohead...)

  • Hmmm. Played fine on my PII 266. Even when I made it play fullscreen (I run at 1600x1200)...

  • It goes through most of the install, then says that there is a new version of the installer - that it will download the new installer and then run it. Then it just closes all the &$^@! windows. Anyone have any ideas?

    Leilah
  • Ditto on the no sound thing with QT3. I'm running a P2-300 with 128MB and it just barely plays.... Attempting to download QT4 though gives a no DNS entry found for ftp.info.apple.com... damn.... and that trailer looks so nice..... oh well.... guess I'll have to wait....
  • Anyone else think that the new QT4 interface looks kinda like a Palm V? It has that brushed metal look with a rounded Pilot feel. I like the new look.

  • On the PII-300 we have here, running NT of all things *bleah*. Just wish HP would release Linux drivers for their Visualize-fx graphics cards...
  • And the QT4 installer can't establish a connection with the public HTTP download site.

    This is lame. If I have to type in that registration key one more time I'll shoot the first mac I see.
  • Registration Key 'cause I bought QT3 Pro.

    Had to manually configure the proxy to let Apple's installer talk to the download site. It came down fast. I'm glad to see Apple isn't "bandwidth challenged" as they were for so many years.

    Also I'm really impressed with this new trailer. It looks as good as any DVD movie I've ever seen. Sounds great too. There is no comparison between the old and new trailers. This one rocks.
  • a interesting thing is that the size of the new 640 file is 25 meg, the same as the privious highest quality file.

    nice.
    --------------------------------
    check out my music [mp3.com] .
    you might actually like it.

  • well.... you got the smaller one, meaning lower quality meaning lower bitrate meaning less work for your processor to do. I bet you won't be calling it "bs" when your computer can barely display a frame a second if you got the high-quality one
  • Don't forget to e-mail it to at least five other people while you're at lunch!
  • RTSP/RTP Proxy
    The RTSP proxy is an application-specific proxy which would normally be run in a border zone or perimeter network.

    http://www.apple.com/quicktime/developers/tools. html

    Platforms

    The RTSP Proxy has been built for a variety of platforms, including

    IRIX 6.x
    Solaris 2.x
    RedHat Linux 5.0 x86
    Cobalt Linux mips

    And also a couple of notes by users at:
    http://www.macintouch.com/nab1999qt4reader.html
  • No, QT for Java just lets use use QT from Java applications.

    As has been said many times, you need the codecs for linux. The file format has not changed for several years, but the available codecs, the tools and the API's have changed.
  • Dynamic downloaders are still evil. We're behind a proxy here at work, one that requires userid/password authorization. Do you think the QT4 installer can handle this? Noooooo... Proxy, yes, but not proxy-with-authorization.

    Then again, maybe it's just my company's proxy server that's evil.
  • What's the problem? Just download the whole QT package at once and be done with it.

    Great. I'd love to. Got a URL for the WinNT version?
  • Just get on your trust Lynx and just download it. Great thing about Lynx is that YOU control everything about it.
  • At least from the little use I've had with
    it, it seems to improve substantially on QT3
    allowing a few more features, a spiffy kewl
    looking new UI and much higher quality sound
    playback. Video seemed equal or better. To
    those thinkin about it, download QT 4.0

    .. besides, after watching the SW trailer, you
    need QT4 to watch the new public enemy videos,
    if your into that sorta thing.

    -Z
  • I have a RIVA TNT 16mb agp2x card. Are they saying that with that kind of card, my 200MHz AMD K6 wouldn't be able to play it? Not to mention my 96MB of SDRAM? If not, than their new quicktime is crap.
  • I discovered why I couldn't view QT streaming at work. My office's DSL line is being shared with IP masqing, and the beta of QT4 doesn't handle the protocols for masqeraded addresses. This is really going to suck if they don't fix it in the final version.
  • I'll try out the links you guys gave me
  • I've forced IP NetRouter to map out the necessary RTP/RTSP ports as described on Macintouch's QT4 feedback page [macintouch.com], but it can only map out ports for one machine at a time! It's okay for now because the other people in my office don't care/know about streaming video, but if it's this much trouble to get one machine to view a stream, quite a few people are going to pass over QT4's streaming features.

    I've also been informed that Apple has made available the source code to compile a RTP/RTSP proxy. This is no good to me, because it only works on 'nix. My software router's a Mac. Does anyone know of another solution?
  • The reason why the 640 trailer doesn't playback sound in QT3 is that it uses the new QDesign2 sound codec. If you want any idea how good the new sound codec is, the old trailer was 480 pixels wide, had 22khz sound, and was 24.8 MB. The new trailer is 640 pixels wide, has 44khz sound and is 25.2 MB (video track is much larger, sound track is higher quality and is much smaller).

    The quicktime streaming examples took forever to see (too many people trying to get on the same 3 sites) but when I finally got to see it, it was okay... about the same as RealVideo (as in, it sounds like talking through a tincan and looks like fingerpaint).

    BTW, there's no point in converting this to MPEG or AVI. The file size would either be enormous or look crappy, won't be much better than the previous trailer you've already seen, and how many times have you already seen this thing!?!
  • I just download QT4 for NT yesterday, but when I just went to the trailer page QT is already telling me I need to download new components to see the trailer.

    Only a 800K download, and it does it for you.

    The initial install was also a 'dynamic download' thing, so you only downloaded some sort of nub installer and got the rest when you chose what option you wanted to install.

    In general, I think such dynamic installers are evil, but from work with a T1 that doesn't go down, it went fine. QT 4 hasn't stumbled yet.
  • A PII 400? Yah right. I ran this on the following system PII - 333 64 MB Ram It worked JUST fine. It's funny when you can say all the lines in the trailer from memory.
  • Did you try just dl-ing the trailer without QT4?

    I can actually get playback with QT3, but there's no sound. I wonder if QT4 will make it both smoother and enable the sound, because it's sorta jerky right now, on my PPro200

    AS
  • You're right!
    The video itself should be like 178 times larger, but the filesize difference is insignificant.

    Under QT3, both the new and old (640 vs 480) files list their video codec as Sorensen, while the sound format was unrecognized..

    However, the sound format was now 44kHz, as opposed to 22kHz in the older file.

    So not only is there more video, there's twice as much audio; no surprise then it takes such horsepower to uncompress it, perhaps...

    AS
  • Load an MP3 into QuickTime player,
    then choose Export.
    You can convert MP3 to .aiff files right in the player!
    'Course, I always use MPecker.. so it's a wash.

    Dave

  • Hmm... I got the my reg. code from buying OS 8.5, so I have QT3 Pro, and it didn't ask me for any registration key... when I go into my quicktime prefs, the reg code is still there. That's weird.

    -----BEGIN ANNOYING SIG BLOCK-----
    Evan

  • on my 266 P2 win98 box 6:00 pm EST, streamed perfectly, no hitches no delays before watching, downloaded the rest in real time as I was watching excellent!
  • A T1 is a high bandwidth line used in the americas. Sometimes called DS1.

    The eupoian equivalent is E1 lines.

    They were invented years ago to route phone calls. They're used to connect offices together and schools to the internet. "Trunk lines". T1s don't run into peoples homes unless they're obsencely rich.

    1.544 mbits /sec full duplex (both directions)
    (1.536 for user traffic)

    T1s are usually divided into 25 channels of 64kbits/sec each. (sort of a mux)

    A T3 (DS3) is 44.7 Megabits per second. Its basically multiple T1s.

    You'd run T1 or T3s into your uninversity from whereever into a router. then connect terminals to a router using 100 base or 10 base T. T1s can run 6000 ft before repeating making them good for long runs.

    They're equivalent to E1 lines in europe which are actaully a little faster (32 64kbitspresec)

    but I digress.


  • Of course your card is capable of displaying the video you threw at it..All modern video cards are.

    But since Sorensen compression isn't part of your video card, your processor has to decode the movie and feed it to the card. Thats why you need a speed y processor and also why the file is a 'Mere" 25 megs.

    I don't know much about the TNT chipset, but most of those cards are designed to crunch 3d games. A few have DVD decompressors. 16 megs would be enough to show millions of high color pixels.

    try it. It should work.
  • Mindcraft would release skewed results with the Windoze machine being optimized and the Mac running 50 extensions.

    Didn't you all hear about what Mindcraft did with the Windoze NT vs Linux test?

    Ah. Maybe you *were* being sarcastic.
  • I suspect Apple is also promoting their G3 300mhz
    system is just as fast or faster than a P2-400mhz.
    Perhaps MindCraft can publish benchmark test.
  • Without the "click here to get plugin" crap? Or know the trick to circumvent that. thanx
  • I wonder if that explains why QT4 doesn't bug you about making a paid upgrade to QT4Pro everytime you want to use it. If Apple wants to compete with Real then they should get rid of the upgrade NOW or LATER buttons.

    Real wouldn't be as popular as it is today if their basic player constantly asked you to buy the G2 Plus.
  • They should just release it in the industry
    standards... MPeg and AVI.

  • Looked at it under QuickTime 3. No sound. So I'm downloading QuickTime 4. 1.1kb/sec on our T1! Man is that fast.
  • just like tricked out V-6 can have better overall performance than a V-8, depending on piston size, cams, carburetion, exhaust, casting weight ... The PPC does more work at lower revs more efficiently than a Pentium at the same clock speed. Sorry, it's physics and design, not propaganda. It's called RISC. Look into it.

  • some sort of a muting feature (in QT3 anyway). Seen this on some PC's in our lab. Click on the movie and the sound returns.
  • ok lets just start listing what sort of performance we all got with what hardware when playing the movie...

    here I'll start:
    work PC with a P2 350 & a rage pro card & not a bit of slow down with qt4...

    anyone else?

  • 400 PII (Score:1)

    by jthm ( 31469 )
    A little choppy on a 400PII w/64 megs of RAM. Oh yeah the connection is a T-1. Actually it didn't get choppy till the end.
  • Is it worth it upgrading to a PII 400 just for a Star Wars trailor? But more imporant is it worth booting into windows to use their quicktime 4 becouse there is no linux port? These are both ponders questions.

  • Well (Score:1)

    by KingBob ( 33381 )
    For goodness sake don't give them any ideas - they are into us too deep as it is!

    :-)
  • it's amazing! wonderful quality...i can't wait for the movie now!
  • that 300Mhz thing is bs...my 133 laptop played it beautifully, of course i didn't download the 640 one...25Mbs? that would take all day on my connection =(....i dl'd the 13Mb one...
  • I just downloaded QT4 (being the Star Wars nut that I am) and found that the trailer will not run all the way through. I would think that my hardware is sufficient (PIIx2/400, 128 MB PC100 SDRAM, UW SCSI)...but the OS is NT4 SP4.

    I have encountered this problem before -- the solution then was to move the file to the NT boot drive and run it from there. Appears to be a bandwidth / caching issue. Now, this solution won't work. I can't even get it to work by streaming the file off my server (10 Mbit ethernet) -- another previous solution.

    This isn't just the 25 MB trailer having problems -- it appears to be a Quicktime player problem. My other quicktime files experience the same problem. Does anyone know of a solution? Perhaps the (Quicktime?) settings need to be tweaked?

    On the topic of trailer downloads starwars.countingdown [countingdown.com] has links to mirrors of this file. If someone is good enough to make a MPEG conversion, I have no doubts a link will show up there. Just so countingdown doesn't get /.ed (too badly), the mirrors (as of this writing) are: Mirror 1 [rit.edu] Mirror 2 [dhs.org] Mirror 3 [152.2.95.222] Mirror 4 [energizerpro.com]

  • Already waiting in line for
    Star Wars: The Phantom Menace?

    Ha! SW tent campers are a month!
  • There are:
    - developer builds
    - internal betas
    - NDA'd developer betas
    - currently ONE SINGLE public beta, called preview
    All of them are regular "free" ones. astonishing, isn't it :)

    As far as i know the downloadable one is a
    web installer that has abt. 400 kB and requires
    internet access while installing. A fully packed
    version from apples public quicktime site is
    out of my scope. At least i havent found such.

    But there is a possibility to activate further features.
    You should buy a registration key to do that.
    It is then called QuickTime 4.0 PRO.

    Thats all folks.
  • Movie is mirrored (many other places too) at: http://cwrulug.cwru.edu/star_wars/mesace_640qt4.mo v

  • Must learn to type...

    Also mirrored on the CWRULUG [cwru.edu] ftp server.
  • 400mhz P-II? Wow. So they finally found a use for these computers, besides games and webserving. I choose to wait for the movie to show up on the local cinema (which will be in August here in Sweden :-( )

    // Simon
  • My peice of junk computer is a cheap, 2-yr-old, off the shelf P200MMX, and I know it won't play those. Its a shame tho! That sounds like a cool trailer.
  • If you download the .mov file, you can play it with QuickTime 3.0. The video looks great, but there is no sound. I guess you need QuickTime 4.0 to get the sound.

    Also, it plays fine on my P233MMX with crappy S3 Virge display adapter. Even if I double the size it runs smoothly.
  • I've got a P233MMX running NT 4.0. I could play the trailer with QT3 and the video was smooth, but there was no sound. So I installed QT4. Things only got worse. I could play the high-res trailer, and the sound was fine, but the video was really slow, one frame every few seconds.

    Even worse, when I tried to play menace_480.mov, it was also choppy! menace_480.mov worked perfectly using QT3. So my "upgrade" to QT4 was anything but. I'm sticking with QT3.
  • Here's how I did it:

    Make an html document with a link to:

    http://www.apple.com/home/media/menace_640qt4.mo v

    Then load the page, and right-click the link and choose "Save Link As..."

  • I do hope you all realise that QuickTime 4.0 is -just- a preview release right now. Apple released it basically as a public beta in order to root out some of the annoying little bugs that everyone is kvetching about.

    My Mac is still dead due to a corrupted drive (DIE ADAPTEC! DIE!) so I haven't had the chance to check it on the Mac side. BUT, I did download QuickTime 4.0 on a Windows95 machine. It played the 320x240 trailer without a hitch and it's only a P-90. I consider that pretty good.

    For more, non-apple info on QuiokTime 4.0 check out this article at AppleInsider [appleinsider.com]:

    Apple to Announce QuickTime 4 Preview Release [appleinsider.com]

  • Anybody know what HTTP server the QT4 installer stub tries to get get content from? I need the
    IP number because my upstream provider's DNS is hosed and I can't resolve any Apple domain names.
  • My dual PIIIs just yawned when I ran this thing. Have anything challenging?


    PDG--"I don't like the Prozac, the Prozac likes me"
  • Sounds to me like some lil bitch can't handle the fact that brute force CAN get the job done. Don't blame me cuz I have the means to do it while you tinker along with you P90.


    PDG--"I don't like the Prozac, the Prozac likes me"
  • Who said anything about Win98? Do you just assume things or does your SGI system give you telepathic abilities too?

    I started out stating that I had no problems cuz all I heard was bitching and moaning about how its impossible to run.

    As for the flame about the PIII, hey, when they gave me PIIIs for the price of PIIs, I wasn't about to argue with em.


    PDG--"I don't like the Prozac, the Prozac likes me"
  • I would have loved to use K7s, but you try to find me a motherboard which handles SMP for socket 7 and intgerated Ultra2 SCSI.



    PDG--"I don't like the Prozac, the Prozac likes me"

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