A friend recently asked if there was any place he could download the video from Apple's September 9th special event announcing iTunes 9, the new iPod nano, and the iPhone OS 3.1. He knew all about the liveblogging done by the likes of Macworld and Ars Technica, but he wanted to see the real deal, complete with Steve Jobs and the musical performance by Norah Jones.

The easiest way to tune in - albeit a day or so afterwards - is to subscribe to the Apple Keynotes podcast in iTunes. You may need to update the podcast manually every so often, since new episodes appear only every few months, so iTunes may decide you aren't listening sufficiently often to continue with automatic downloads. An added benefit of this for people like me is that I can keep the videos around to see what Apple really said at some time in the past in case I suspect that a story is changing.

Readers Ben Wheeler and Michael Schmitt informed me of two other ways you can reliably find the video of an Apple event, either later that day or the next day. Ben pointed out that the Apple home page will usually have a link (one of the boxes at the bottom) to the video of the event, though that will disappear once Apple has something more timely to replace it with.

Michael noted that Apple provides an Apple Events page in its QuickTime Guide that lists recent events; this is probably the most reliable place to find events after the fact if you don't want to subscribe to the Apple Keynotes podcast. The other advantage of this page is that you can choose among different formats, including full HD.