If I didn't take in utf-8 on the input (parse) then I'd have to introduce new code to utf-8-encode the data on output.

Without an encode pass on output obviously we're left with the escaped multi-byte data as plain-text.

So as I was adding back the rest of the content I discovered a few important things about the feeds and some deficiencies in the original script (again, I didn't write the original )

The original script was parsing through two feeds. A 720p feed and a feed for normal size videos (usually up to 640 wide). Each feed contains a PREVIEW section which contains keys to represent different sizes for the movie files. Both feeds use only the "LARGE" key however. It would have been nice if Apple had only a single feed and then used the size key to simply specify all the different file sizes available.

Anyway, the script used the 720 feed to hard-code a filename substitution to try and guess a possible 1080 file. However the substitution was searching for "a720p.mov" and not all the included movies had that final extension. Some were specified as .m4v

But there are no 1080 alternates with an m4v extension on the server....

I thought about doing some better file extension handling but then after some poking around on Apple's site I discovered that all files included in the feed were ALSO available with the a720.mov extensions. At this point it started to look like I could ignore the extension in the feed.

The standard feed seems to be a superset of the 720 and as of today, contained a couple of movies not included on the 720. All movies in the standard feed end in h640w.mov

I've changed the script to make it only look at the standard feed and from that to make substitutions for the correct extensions to obtain the HD files.

I've duplicated the original 1080 conditional two times so the script can handle every different size uniquely, falling back from the highest to the lowest (vars allow enabling/disabling specific HD sizes): 1080p > 720p > 480p > standard 640w

I can improve the logic but my biggest concern was to make sure the file capturing was working properly.

From a functional point of view I'll have to keep watch to find out if files are ever introduced into the regular feed with a different extension other than h640w.mov - if so I'll have to include some logic instead of simple substitution to create the other filenames (otherwise it will never try to grab an HD version and will instead grab the standard version and simply name the output file with the HD filename).

Next post will contain the script.