The Yahoo! Movies Problem

Problem: Yahoo!Movies only works on Windows or Mac!

Reason: Yahoo! has implemented a rather annoying flavor of Operating System/Browser/Plugin detection that denies the very existence of Linux and those of us who use it. Ironic given that most of the Internet is powered by Linux in the first place!

There is no way were going to be stopped from glorious pablum viewing because Yahoo movies was programed on a Friday! On to the fix!

The Fix:

To view movie trailers on Yahoo! we will simply trick Yahoo! into believing we are also one of the uninformed masses. In other words, we can keep our sunglasses on and Yahoo! will have no idea that we know that THEY LIVE!

Requirements:

• Firefox.
• VLC player.
• VLC-Mozilla-Firefox plugin.
• Firefox User-Agent-Switcher plugin.

If all of these are installed and the VLC Firefox plugin works all we need to do is go to our favorite movie trailer page and switch our user agent:

Tools[menu] -> User Agent Switcher -> Netscape-XP or Opera-XP

Notes:

• The VLC plugin for Firefox will show "No Video" until the clip is loaded.
• The VLC plugin for Firefox that I installed using Adept was broken. To get a working VLC I had to install the latest version from source.