While having fun with Fiddler and the Zune software, I downloaded something cool. When browsing the Zune Video Marketplace I started teasing out links to where the movie trailers, intended for streaming within the software, were located. I noticed they were WMV files. Now, I wanted to see if I could download the trailers outside the Zune software. I copied the address out of Fiddler and pasted it into Firefox. Success, I now had the trailer for Star Trek on my PC.

After downloading a few more trailers I realized that some of the movie trailers had cover art attached to them while others did not. Others were not trailers at all –- only brief scenes from the movies themselves. One was categorized as a ‘Movie.’ The split in trailer type seemed to breakdown by movie studio or film age as older films tended  to show only scenes or lacked the cover art (though not always the case). The process of adding cover art to WMV files is not too well known. Because of this it seems like someone put in a little work to make this happen. Also all the files are in a Zune-friendly WMV format.

I wonder though, since all three platforms (Zune.net, Zune software, and Xbox  360) stream these trailers, does it stand to follow that the ability to download the trailers might be coming? Or, is this just me finding the location of the video trailers in the new unified Xbox 360-Zune Video Marketplace. If the latter, why add the cover art if nobody is going to see it? I mean the Austin Powers clip has additional summary info added as well. It seems like too much work to ignore but not consistent enough to make sense.