3.4. Streaming from network or pipes

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 -

Note

It is also recommended to enable -cache when playing from the network:

wget ftp://micorsops.com/something.avi -O - | mplayer -cache 8192 -

3.4.1. Saving streamed content

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:

mplayer http://217.71.208.37:8006 -dumpstream -dumpfile stream.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, RTSP, and so forth.