Yahoo Music on OS X… sort of

Yahoo! Music has one of the best collections of streaming music videos on the Internet, but unfortunately, the people behind the site still steadfastly refuse to support Mac OS X, instead recommending that viewers use Netscape 4.7 for Classic to view the videos. (Buhhh?!)

So, well, I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands. Based upon the VBScript offered in this OSNews guide, I’ve hacked together a rather rudimentary AppleScript to take a music video URL copied to the clipboard and open the direct link to that video stream. So, without further ado, here’s the script; share and enjoy.

I’ll gladly take down this script as soon as Yahoo decides to support some OS X native browser… and until then, this isn’t exactly stealing any ad revenues from Yahoo, since video ads don’t show up in Netscape 4.7 either.

Edited 2005/06/24 to add: Obviously Yahoo’s figured this one out; they’re now hiding the direct links inside the onClick attribute of the links, while pointing the actual href to a different page. Viewing source will solve that problem pretty easily. 🙂

Edited 2005/09/28 to add: It seems like they stopped hiding the links in Javascript now, at least from what I’ve seen.

Edited 2006/03/23 to add: Yahoo fiddled with their links a while back so that this particular script doesn’t appear to work anymore. I recommend using Firefox together with PKLaunch, which does the job admirably.