So, you may have heard the Star Wars Blu-rays are coming out in a couple of weeks.
After the last of the prequels came out, I was annoyed at Lucas’ clumsy storytelling, and… well, with those and the Special Editions, it felt like a cheapening of some great movies that I loved from my childhood. […]
When you upload a QuickTime or other movie file to Dropbox, and then get the “public link” to give to someone else, Dropbox does a really cool thing and redirects the original movie file link to deliver a very simple web page with the movie embedded in it instead. Which looks great in a browser if you just need to view a quick clip — but what if you actually intended for the link to be a download instead?
It turns out the trick is a little obscure, but fairly simple. All you need to do is add ?&dl=1 to the end of the “public link” URL. So:
http://files.getdropbox.com/.../movie.mov
becomes instead:
http://files.getdropbox.com/.../movie.mov?dl=1
Once you do that, Dropbox forces the download link, and the movie will download instead of playing in your browser.
