How to view c0ntent from a windoid website?

[Calum]

so i go to http://launch.yahoo.com/artist/videos.a ... ID=1016205 to see the three videos there, and when i click the links i get told "sorry", but i have to have a 4.7 version browser if i use netscape (i am using firebird 0.7), so i install the prefbar (which it explicitly says at mozdev won't work with versions of "phoenix" over 0.5, even though i installed it without a hitch), and now the site thinks i am using netscape 4.7 on a mac, so obviously they just wanted to take the CeNsOrEd, and force me to use their sanctioned software. Anyway, NOW i get a message telling me "sorry" but i have to have windows mediocre player 9 installed, or i don't get to see the videos. Now i know this to be utter bollocks also since anything that can be played in mediocre player can be played in mplayer to my knowledge. BUT this time there's no prefbar to the rescue.

Any ideas how i can sort this out and see the videos? any ideas appreciated! even if i was to fire up my windows partition, there's no way i will be installing media player 9.

[Void Main]

I would send a serious complaint letter. There are very few instances where I haven't been able to work around the web designers windows idiosyncrasies but this one takes the cake! They have the video so buried in javascript and flash that I just don't have the time to dig through their garbage. I don't see how there is any explanation other than them intentionally make it so you needed to be running Windows and the latest media player spyware.

Why is it that if you aren't running the latest versions of M$ stuff that you *must* run the oldest version of Netscape on Mac? I mean come on, how old is nutscrape 4.x? I *almost* got it to work in Firefox with flash installed and having the user agent set to WinXP with IE6. At least the player came up, just got no video. this is the absolute nastiest proprietary web site I have ever seen.

Strange coming from YaHoo who are usually pretty good about compatibility. Makes me wonder what the motivations are behind it. I hate to jump to a conspiracy theory but if it's not they should be receptive to feedback. If they are not receptive to feed back then conspiracy it is.

Also, I tried it under Mozilla 1.6 and the crappy buggy flash code caused the crappy buggy proprietary not latest release of the flash plugin to crash, thus crashing the browser. There is no place on the web for flash as a standard. Anyone who says otherwise is a complete idiot. If flash were open and the latest version of the plugin were available for all OSs and browsers then maybe, not until then.

[agent007]

Its high time, distros start bundling mplayer and chat apps and integrate these 'more' into the browser...

[Void Main]

Its high time, distros start bundling mplayer and chat apps and integrate these 'more' into the browser...

Actually that has nothing to do with this particular issue. This is definately a problem with the way the web site is coded and it specifically requires flash and MS media player.

mplayer-plugin works great with Mozilla and does a nice job of seamlessly playing embedded video on most sites I go to:

http://mplayerplug-in.sourceforge.net/

Or "apt-get install mplayer-plugin".

[Calum]

it's a real shame. i will probably complain, but at the end of the day, i just wanted to see these videos, you know! sometimes i like to do something that doesn't turn out to be political!