msdl: Ripping the format of the Evil One

I kid. There’s nothing inherently evil about mms:// format streams. Not that I am aware of, anyway. 😕

And if you should still stumble across an mms:// URL and wish to access it, you might think back to earlier this year, and mimms. For almost a year mimms languished on this blog in a dubious working-or-not-working state, mostly because yours truly, despite razor-sharp Googling skills :roll:, couldn’t find a live, working mms:// stream.

Well all that changed this morning, and I can now vouch for both mimms and … msdl.

Better late than never, I suppose. 🙄 In my defense, I’m only partly to blame for that, since Microsoft apparently deprecated mms:// format sometime around a decade ago. So finding a working stream depended on a lot of factors beyond my control.

Aside from all that, msdl seems to work with the same alacrity and wild abandon as mimms. I do notice that they both have speed indicators and basic progress counters, which is good.

mimms adds the .wmv extension to its output, while msdl apparently lets the stream determine its filename. Neither way is an issue for me.

msdl has a healthy number of options available as flags, and I particularly like the speed controls and the verbose option, and the option to stop streaming after a set period of time.

While I’m at it, I should be clear that msdl doesn’t just stream mms:// URLs, but can handle rtsp:// as well as a few specialized formats. So no, K.Mandla is not investigating software that only works with a decades-old, deprecated stream format. 😐

Trust me, I’m a professional. 😉

mimms: If only I had an mms link around here somewhere

I don’t seem to have the necessary luck today; after realizing lxdvdrip needed an actual video DVD to work, now I can’t seem to find a working mms:// link to try out mimms.

As best I can tell, that’s the issue. I tried several different links I found around the Interwebs, and nothing came from any of them.

Maybe I am just picking the wrong ones. mimms appears reasonably current; I don’t know that there have been so many advances in mms:// streams in the past five years that mimms would be put out to pasture for them.

(I joke, but I’m also fairly certain the links I’ve tried are dead or dormant; mplayer can’t get to them either, but at least shows a little more information for the effort.)

So until I can find a working, live mms:// link, I’ll mark this one as working … just missing its most important component. 🙄

Edit, 2014-11-06: Better late than never, I found a live link, and let mimms do its thing:

So there you have it: mimms works exactly like it should. Mystery solved. 😉