Mauriat Miranda     mjmwired

Yahoo Launch on Firefox in Fedora

Fedora users can access full Launch.Yahoo music videos with Firefox. The basic trick is to use the GreaseMonkey Firefox Extension and making use of MPlayer and it’s browser plugin and encoder system.

Watching Streaming Music Videos

  1. First make sure you have MPlayer installed in your Fedora and the mplayerplugin-in working correctly. You can check by going to: about:plugins in Firefox.

  2. Install the GreaseMonkey Firefox Extension. If you are using Firefox 1.0.x, install version 0.5.3. If you are using Firefox 1.5.x, install version 0.6.4. Once installed, the GreaseMonkey icon will appear in the bottom right of the FireFox window.

  3. Install pkLaunch. To install Right-Click over “Open pklaunch-0.8.user.js”, and select Install User Script…. A window will open showing pkLaunch and that “launch.yahoo” and “music.yahoo” have both been added as “Included pages” for this script.

  4. Click on any music video at Yahoo Music. A window will open titled “data: - Yahoo Music”.

Done!

Saving Music Videos to Disk

The following works with some degree of success. Since you are streaming, the quality may not be perfect or there may be some “hiccups”.

  1. As stated above, make sure you have MPlayer installed, as well as MEncoder. MEncoder is extra component in the MPlayer package that allows you to convert audio and video.

  2. In Step #4 above, when the video window opens, Right-Click in the video and select Copy URL.

  3. Open a command terminal with a Paste option. I recommend either gnome-terminal in Gnome or konsole in KDE. (Note: if you prefer xterm you need to paste to a text editor first and highlight before continuing.)

  4. In the command terminal window enter the following but do NOT hit [Enter]:

mencoder -ovc copy -oac copy -o myvideo.wmv

Note: the the ending quotes. Then paste the text copied in Step #2. It will be long! After pasting, close the command with a set of quotes: " … and hit [Enter].

This will copy the data from the server. Since it is streaming, it will take at least as long as it takes to view the content (> 3Min).

When done, you should be able to play the video file in MPlayer. I do not know if the file will be viewable in Windows.

Tested Versions: FF 1.0.4, FF 1.0.7, GM 0.5.3, MPlayer 1.0pre7, mplayerplug-in 3.14 Should work with FF 1.5, but I haven’t tested it yet.

Posted in: FC4, Multimedia,

5 Comments:

  • derrik on March 2, 2006 - 06:18 PM

    thanks, i have ubuntu hooked up to my tv and home stereo and was hoping to get yahoo’s launch videos working on it, i’m going to try this out as soon as i get home. wish me luck

  • astrosapiens on March 19, 2006 - 11:23 PM

    It did not work for me with myvideo.wmv but it worked with myvideo.avi

    Also I tested it under windows and it ran…well..kind of. It was very choppy.

  • Mauriat on October 31, 2006 - 09:21 PM

    Unfortunately, dumpstream will not always work.

  • Arren Lex on June 12, 2006 - 01:01 AM

    You are a silly goose. Why on earth would you stream?

    $ mplayer -dumpstream “"
    $ mv stream.dump myfile.wmv

  • Mauriat on April 29, 2006 - 06:18 PM

    This information works fine in FC4 using FF 1.5