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,

The most current version of Flash for Linux is version 7.0 while Windows users are already on 8.0. However Macromedia has officially stated that there will be an upcoming version 8.5 for Linux. However it will be shipped after the Windows version becomes available. Even though that post states that no 64bit version is being planned, another engineer has stated that there is some work being done towards a 64bit version.

In the end, it’s good news to see Macromedia/Adobe putting forth some effort to support Linux .

Posted in: Desktop, Linux, Multimedia, Software,

Due to an upgrade in GCC, the next test release of Fedora Core 5 will be pushed back a few weeks. Personally, I planned on using the holidays to test it, but I do not think that will be an option.

From the fedora-devel mailing list:

Ok, it won’t be a full month, but due to the recent upgrade of gcc and the subsequent full rebuild of everything that does (and doesn’t, whoops!) get built with gcc, including java stuff with gcj, and the need to further test package selection windows in Anaconda, system-config-packages for upgrades, and the development tree in general once we settle down the rebuilds, we have decided to delay test2. Here is a new schedule that we will be working toward:

• Test2 freeze date to 9 January
• Test2 release, 16 January
• Test3 freeze, 6 February
• Test3 release, 13 February
• Final absolute freeze, 6 March
• Release, 15 March

Unfortunately I did not install FC5 Test1 due to the fact that the alternative installation methods were not working. I usually boot from the first ISO CD-ROM image then install from the 5 ISO files from the hard disk. I have confirmed that this installation method will be tested and working for FC5 Test2.

Posted in: Distributions, FC5, Fedora,

Nvidia recently released an update (1.0-8174) to their high performance Linux video card drivers. Usually driver releases are done to support new hardware. In this case SLI series video cards and others such as the GeForce 6100, GeForce 6150 and GeForce 7800 GTX 512. Other than the driver itself, there were some significant changes made.

• There is finally an HTML Readme. Previously the text based file was very hard to navigate. (BUT these HTML files do not work in Mozilla or Firefox due to improper mimetypes!!! )
• This a nvidia-xconfig application included. The installer will properly configure your xorg.conf file. No need to do it manually.

From my installation it appears as though the installer has become more sophisticated, which is welcomed. Many Linux newbies have had frustrations with installing the Nvidia driver.

My FC4 Installation Guide has been updated to reflect this new release.

EDIT: Dec 23, 2005 There was an incremental update 1.0-8178. If everything worked from 8174, no upgrade is required.

Posted in: Devices, Gaming, Hardware, Linux,

About 2 years ago I purchased a Linux based PDA: the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500. The PDA was intended to be used on Windows and (later) Linux. The initial driver for Windows setup the device as a USB network device, however the latest driver set it up as a normal USB PDA. I found that using the older driver, I can assign an IP address to the device and configure it as a mini server. Although I no longer use it as a PDA, I have set up an Apache Web Server, MySQL database and PHP interpretter on it - all managed by setting up the SSH server. I sometimes plug it on various machines and do some web development or toy around with it.

I only recently heard of the Black Dog pocket Linux server. When plugged into ANY computer it will create a basic X-server and run a few basic (Linux) applications from the device within the host OS (Windows, Linux, etc.). It works similar to the Zaurus' network capability over USB. Hence it can access anything the host computer can access. Even better it has an intelligent resume feature which can pretty much preserve your working desktop and resume it in place later on a different machine.

It ships with a 400Mhz process, 64MB RAM and base 256MB flash-based storage. My Zaurus, to compare, has 206Mhz, 32MB RAM and 64MB storage. Better yet it comes with a biometric scanner, is only 3.5 by about 2 inches in size, and already comes with Apache, SSH and several other programs ready to run. For about $250 you can get the 512MB model and if you plug in another SD card you can increase your storage easily.

Looks like I just found my Christmas present for myself.

Posted in: Devices, Linux, Miscellaneous, Server,