Yahoo! Launch is a Yahoo! service which offers various music videos and streaming radio, but one of its biggest downfalls is its inability to work with Netscape-based browsers (like Mozilla and Firefox). You’d think in today’s day and age, major companies would support popular alternative browsers, but not in this case. Fortunately, you could always download the videos with a little tweaking and by using the awesome (and free) media player Video Lan Client, or VLC. The best part is that this will work on Windows, Macs, and Linux machines. Read on to learn how.

What you will need:

1. Video Lan Client
2. The web-based, SteamKing Utility

The setup

• First, head on over to Yahoo! Launch and sign in using your Yahoo! ID.
• As an example, we’ll use on of the videos on the front page, in this case, the Dave Matthews Band video for “Dreamgirl.” Right-click on the link for the video, and click on Properties. You will now see a window pop up that looks like this:

• If you look at the image above towards the end of the link, you will see a number. It’s this number we’ll use to find the download link via the SteamKing Utility.
• Head on over to the SteamKing Utility website and scroll towards the bottom. Here you will see a text field where you will enter the number we found in the link properties. The “Dreamgirl” video’s number, for example, is 23148063. Enter the number and click Submit Query.

• You will now see that SteamKing gives takes the ID of the video, and converts it into a link. The important one we’re looking for now is the mms:// link. While we show you the link for the 128k stream, if you have a broadband connection and want better quality, choose the 300k stream link provided.
• Copy the mms:// link and fire up VLC.
• In VLC, go to File and click on Open Network Stream.
• In the options window, select HTTP/HTTPS/FTP/MMS and paste the mms:// link you just copies here. At this point, you could click OK to view the video, but you want to save it to your computer, right?

• To save the video, check the Stream Output box and click on Settings.
• In the Stream Output window, check the boxes labeled File and Dump raw input.
• Next, click the Browse button and select a filename and directory where you’re going to save your video. After the filename, be sure to add .wmv which is the Windows Media Video extension which Yahoo! Launch uses.
• Click OK until you return to the main VLC window and you will see the VLC progress bar start moving. This means it’s downloading the file!

Sure, it might be a lot of steps, but you’ll be able to enjoy any music video on any computer since VLC will run on Windows, Macs, Linux, and other platforms, as well.

[Via Uneasy Silence]

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