Greetings! Welcome to my page! I'm Major MMS

On this page you find tools and a xine plugin down download and watch internet streams using Microsoft's MMS protocol.

Finding MMS:// style urls

To use the software below, you need to dig out mms://-type urls out of web pages. These streams are originally designed to be watched using Microsoft's internet explorer, but using this cool software, this stuff is accessible from Linux!!

Here's how to do it:

  • go to the page you want to watch streams from, e.g. CNN video
  • select the stream you want to watch (make sure it's a windows media stream)
  • select "show page source" or "show frame source" from the context menu
  • you'l either find a mms://-type url directly or you'll find a http:// link like http://www.cnn.com/video/world/2002/01/21/jb.shoe.bomb.cafe.cnn.low.asx. In the latter case use wget to download the .asx file, you'll find the mms://-url in that file
  • if you want to watch the stream directly, make sure you have my xine mms-plugin installed and type xine mms://...
  • if you want to download the stream, use mmsclient:
    mmsclient mms://...
  • links to all the software below

The xine plugin

Download the xine plugin tarball here: xine-mms-0.0.3.tar.gz. Make sure you have installed the latest versions of xine-lib and xine-ui, then:

tar xfvz xine-mms-0.0.3.tar.gz
cd xine-mms-0.0.3
./configure
make
make install

Now enjoy watching Microsoft Media! :-)

The download utility

You have found a stream you'd like to store on your harddrive?
You'd like to watch a 300k stream but only have a 56k connection?
No Problem! Just download and install mms_client-0.0.3.tar.gz

to use it, simply type 

mmsclient mms://...
don't let yourself confuse by the verbose output, once it's finished, you'll find the stream asf file in the current directory.

Credits

This software would never have been possible without the help from http://get.to/sdp

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