For the Boys!

Kids have been good as of late and I rewarded them the other week by purchasing Gnomeo & Juliet. The move came with "extras" which in the iTunes life is like getting the special features on a DVD movie. So deleted scenes, commentaries and the such like are available in the extra if you click on it.

Well, needless to say they boys found out that they could not see the extra's on Gnomeo & Juliet. After checking I noticed it was only the last two movies we had purchased on iTunes that would not play. One movie was purchase before the upgrade to Lion and one was purchased after. It had me real perplexed. So I scheduled a called with Apple support.

They called about 10 minutes later and even after them viewing my screen and me showing them what was going on they could not figure it out and said they would send it to and engineer and they would get back to me in 3-5 business days. They did come up with a work around to let me view any additional videos included in the "extras" which eventually let me solve it myself. So, I'll give them some credit.

Anyhow, when we went to play the extras here is what it looked like:



Yeah, not very exciting. What you are looking at is what a simple webpage looks like when you code it by hand. So I knew something was wrong with the html file.

The workaround Apple had me do was to find the file "Gnomeo & Juliet - iTunes Extra.ite" and remove the ".ite" extension. It magically then became a folder I could browse into and there was the offending index.html file. The only problem was I really didn't know what was wrong. This is were that Unix certification back in the early 90's paid off.

I finally compared the two different index.html files. One that worked and one that displayed the awful HTML code. I was in a "Terminal" windows looking at each file with the "more" command and I noticed the ones that didn't work both had a "<U+FEFF>" at the very beginning of the file. I ended up coding a file by hand and getting it to work but later, after I found an easier way, I went back and issued the following commands:

mv index.html index_html.orig
tail -c +4 index_html.orig > index.html

Once that is done, you re-add the ".ite" extention to the folder and then go back into iTunes and double click on the extras and it will correctly display:



Success! Yes, it is a big deal. They boys for some reason love all the bonus features.