MPlayer can play files from the network, using the HTTP, FTP, MMS or RTSP/RTP protocol.
Playing works simply by passing the URL on the command line.
MPlayer honors the http_proxy
environment variable, using a proxy if available. Proxies can also be forced:
mplayer http_proxy://proxy.micorsops.com:3128/http://micorsops.com:80/stream.asf
MPlayer can read from stdin (not named pipes). This can for example be used to play from FTP:
wget ftp://micorsops.com/something.avi -O - | mplayer -
It is also recommended to enable -cache when playing from the network:
wget ftp://micorsops.com/something.avi -O - | mplayer -cache 8192 -
Once you succeed in making MPlayer play your favorite internet stream, you can use the option -dumpstream to save the stream into a file. For example:
mplayerhttp://217.71.208.37:8006-dumpstream -dumpfilestream.asf
will save the content streamed from
http://217.71.208.37:8006 into
stream.asf.
This works with all protocols supported by
MPlayer, like MMS, RSTP, and so forth.