Copying a streaming video to a file using mencoder.

I wanted to watch Randy Pausch's last lecture on my home media PC as opposed to my laptop. It has MythTV, which can be used to watch any file on the hard disk. Unfortunately, you can't just download the a file, as his lecture is hosted by a streaming server. The specific URL is:

mms://wms.andrew.cmu.edu/001/pausch.wmv  

wget won't work, so I had to use mencoder to download the stream and copy it to a file on my hard disk. The command line I used was:

 mencoder mms://wms.andrew.cmu.edu/001/pausch.wmv -o randy.wmv -oac copy -ovc copy

(The -oac and -ovc are the output audio and video codec specfiers, and I have set it to just copy. If you would prefer the file be transcoded to a different format, you could specify a specific codec (xvid with ogg vorbis sound, for example) and mencoder would transcode the file (possibly losing some quality) at the same time.