Downloading password protected MMS Streams

I needed to save an mms:// stream copy to my disk, so that I could watch it offline at a later time, and had difficulty finding the right program under Linux. Totem website claims that they support Authentication dialog, but in practice the application gives you an error and the command line shows: No supported authentication protocol was found. I had no luck with VLC either, as developers outright refused to fix the bug. A command line tool called mimms fared fairly well at saving the unprotected mms stream, but failed miserably at saving the stream requiring login username and password. The basic command syntax looks like this: mimms -v mms://foo.com/bar.wmv local_bar.wmv

After trying Totem, VLC, and mimms, I finally gave up and had to turn to the dark side to find a solution. Under Windows there are dozens of apps that claim to give you the capability to save the streaming media to disk, but I could not find any that would support user authentication. Finally, I ran across a program called NetTransport. It is the only application that works well for downloading mms streams requiring user authentication. You just type in your login username/password, and save the stream to a file on hard-drive. It also has a 1000 other features that you will never use.

Unfortunately at the time of this writing, there is no Linux program that would allow me to do the same. Totem, VLC and miMMS still have no support for mms:// streams requiring user authentication.