>
> Following on from what Ned said, you might also want to look at mplayer
>
> http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/dload.html
>
> which you can compile with a bunch of windows native codecs on x86 
> Linux.  The configure script has a number of options to determine the 
> support for streaming style protocols.  I'm pretty sure that I have 
> watched the various lectures that you are probably referring to on 
> Linux but I might have had to fiddle with the url where the .asf file 
> is concerned.


mplayer comes with mencoder, an invaluable tool for format conversions. 
It takes any of the input file formats that mplayer understands (which 
is quite a lot) and writes out to more common formats. Sorry, but I 
don't have any awkward source material to run a test over, but I've used 
it in the past without difficulty. A quick Google turns up some examples.

> As for working on the Mac, I think you can build mplayer for the Mac 
> but I don't know whether there are wrappers for the x86 dlls or 
> another scheme to decode windows files.


The MPlayer port to OS X is a live-and-kicking SourceForge project at 
http://mplayerosx.sourceforge.net. It not a bad piece of work and 
understands an impressive number of codecs. The project also provides a 
native mencoder for the Mac.

Regards,

Danny.