Alright, after doing some snooping today, I found a totally neat trick to get high quality music videos and concert performances from AOL to import into iTunes in .mov format.
First, go to AOL's music page, a good place to start is here. Say that you want Jessica Simpson's new music video from the Dukes of Hazzard soundtrack. You would search for Jessica Simpson, and if you clicked the "watch these boots are made for walking" link it would send you to a miniature movie viewer here. Every once in a blue moon it will give you an error message about not being mac compatable, but just reload the page and it will usually go away (I use Safari 2.0).
Next, go to window->activity and expand the triangle next to the movie viewer page. Now, you have to look for a link that almost always begins with something like this:
http://nsvapp-prod-rr.stream.aol.co...url=http://progressive.stream.aol.com/aol/us/...
You don't have to expand the triangle next to it, just select that item in activity and copy (command C) it. Next, in a new window, past the hyperlink (it will be long) but extract the portion that looks like this:
http%3A//progressive.stream.aol.com/aol/us/aolmusic/artists/sony/jessicasimpson/jessicasimpson_thesebootsweremade_sony_dl.mov
You then have to replace the %3A after HTTP with a colon ( : ) and hit enter. It will then begin loading a QT movie page. The way I download it, (there's probably a faster way) is to option-double click that item in the activity window to save it to my desktop.
After that, I add it to my itunes library and it works perfectly with no additional codecs. Unfortunately, the "convert selection to AAC" option doesn't work with all of them like it does the movies dl'ed from the iTMS to extract the audio track, but for all of the videos you can get there, small price to pay.
First, go to AOL's music page, a good place to start is here. Say that you want Jessica Simpson's new music video from the Dukes of Hazzard soundtrack. You would search for Jessica Simpson, and if you clicked the "watch these boots are made for walking" link it would send you to a miniature movie viewer here. Every once in a blue moon it will give you an error message about not being mac compatable, but just reload the page and it will usually go away (I use Safari 2.0).
Next, go to window->activity and expand the triangle next to the movie viewer page. Now, you have to look for a link that almost always begins with something like this:
http://nsvapp-prod-rr.stream.aol.co...url=http://progressive.stream.aol.com/aol/us/...
You don't have to expand the triangle next to it, just select that item in activity and copy (command C) it. Next, in a new window, past the hyperlink (it will be long) but extract the portion that looks like this:
http%3A//progressive.stream.aol.com/aol/us/aolmusic/artists/sony/jessicasimpson/jessicasimpson_thesebootsweremade_sony_dl.mov
You then have to replace the %3A after HTTP with a colon ( : ) and hit enter. It will then begin loading a QT movie page. The way I download it, (there's probably a faster way) is to option-double click that item in the activity window to save it to my desktop.
After that, I add it to my itunes library and it works perfectly with no additional codecs. Unfortunately, the "convert selection to AAC" option doesn't work with all of them like it does the movies dl'ed from the iTMS to extract the audio track, but for all of the videos you can get there, small price to pay.