Terence, you can use a pipe to redirect output from mplayer and capture it into a file, while it is playing on screen. For example: First, you must create a pipe: mkfifo ./videoPipe Then, you must execute a process to read stream from this pipe, and play it. Don't forgot '&' for working on background: cat ./videoPipe | tee -a -i video.asf | mplayer - & 'tee' command, save the stream into a file, and send it to 'mplayer'. And finally, you must send data to pipe: mplayer http://user:password@example.com/stream.asf -dumpstream -dumpfile ./videoPipe