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QotD: Music Videos in iTunes 6

Posted October 13th, 2005 @ 04:09pm by Erik J. Barzeski

Question: Where do music videos and movie trailers download to on disk in iTunes 6?

My Answer: I don't know, that's why I'm asking. It was pretty easy to dig out the file before and copy it to your desktop… but iTunes 6 does not put the file in any of the usual places.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

4 Comments »

4 Responses to "QotD: Music Videos in iTunes 6"

  1. | Reply Tim Buchheim
    Posted 12 Oct 2005 at 5:10pm #

    Movie trailers are stored in ~/Library/Caches/QuickTime/downloads as QuickTime Cache (.qtch) files. No, QuickTime Player won't open those.

    I believe this is the same thing that the QuickTime Plugin for Safari does in recent versions.

    Music videos seem to end up in /private/var/tmp/folders.$UID/TemporaryItems/ (where $UID is your numeric user ID) .. these are QuickTime Cache files as well (although without the extension, for whatever reason) .. I have no idea why these are in a different directory. (personally I wish they all ended up in /tmp or /var/tmp .. putting stuff in ~/Library/Caches is obnoxious when you have an NFS directory .. especially if you have a quota set. (Mac OS X freaks out if you hit your quota, and you often have to end up rebooting the machine, as even other users tend to have weird lockups.)

    I used the "lsof" utility to find out where iTunes was putting stuff. (get the PID of the iTunes process, then use "lsof -p $PID" where $PID is the process id) .. Activity Monitor can also be used to get a list of files. (Double-click iTunes, then click on the "Open files and ports" tab.)

  2. | Reply Radu Dutzan
    Posted 12 Oct 2005 at 5:19pm #

    iTunes 7? Ok, iTunes 6 wasn't necessary, it could have perfectly been 5.1, but 7 looks like a bit too much 😛

  3. | Reply Simone Manganelli
    Posted 12 Oct 2005 at 9:25pm #

    Well, I'm not surprised that movie trailers are hard to find on disk, because their location has always been obfuscated. (Answer: I don't really know, but it seems that Tim has provided an answer.) I'm more surprised about the fact that you couldn't find a music video you downloaded, given that this is content you're supposed to be able to access.

    According to Dan Dickinson, at least TV shows are stored in your iTunes music folder, the one you set up in iTunes' advanced preferences. Are you sure you can't find your downloaded music videos inside there?

    (Just in case you were wondering, I don't really want to spend $1.99 on this experiment, but I am interested.)

    -- Simone

  4. | Reply Clint Ecker
    Posted 12 Oct 2005 at 11:46pm #

    I paid for, and downloaded, a music video and it stuck it in ~/Music/iTunes Music/>/>/>.m4v