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Using Automator and scripting to open a URL in QuickTime Player X on Snow Leopard

So my favourite TV channel has this web TV solution that doesn’t quite work like I want it to on my Mac. I figured I’d make an Automator action to compensate for that. Here is, with Norwegian OS text as an added bonus, the whole shebang (click to enlarge):

As it is a service in Safari you can assign a keyboard shortcut to speed up the task even further.

The complete Automator action does these things:

• Gets the source for the current document in Safari with this bit of AppleScript:

on run {input}
  tell application "Safari" to set input to source of document 1
  return input
end run

• Strips out the actual URL for the video stream through some nifty regexp work in a bash shell:

cat "$@" | grep -o 'http://\w\+\.nrk\.no\/nett\-tv\/asx\.aspx?param=\w\+'

• Opens the stripped URL in QuickTime Player with a bit of AppleScript again:

on run {input}
    tell application "QuickTime Player"
        activate
        open URL input
    end tell
end run

It’s a bit of a quick and dirty fix, but it works.

(Sorry for the lack of syntax highlighting, and for the fact that the code snippets are wider than the effing Tumblr template I’m currently using but I promise to fix it eventually!)

Feel free to comment if you like it, or if you think you can improve on it. You’re of course free to use the basic idea of it if you wish to, say, open the current YouTube movie in VLC or something. In that case, let me know how it turns out!

The following deserve praise:

• postlogic on EFNet/#mac1 for help with perl regexp

• ubajas on EFNet/#linuxhelp for help on converting the perl regexp to something grep would understand without -P and jaargon from the same channel for the -o trick with grep.

• John Gruber who wrote an article six years ago about getting the source from Safari with AppleScript.

Finally, if you don’t want to do the work yourself AND LEARN SOMETHING, you can download the zipped Automator action here. :-)

UPDATED: If you download the Automator action from the above link, remember to put it in ~/Library/Services and perhaps restart Safari for the changes to take effect.