How to save a video stream to disk with mplayer

If you want to save a video stream from the web to your disk, you can use mplayer to archive that. Many times the stream you want is in an .aspx file, but you need to find out what the mms:// stream is. One way to do that is to use VLC and open the .aspx-URL with that. When the stream is loaded you can use Tools->Media information and the mms-address should be found in this window.

When the mms-adress is identified the command to save it with mplayer is straight forward:

mplayer -dumpstream mms://the-adress-follows-here -dumpfile filename-you-want-to-save-as.avi