I would normally use ffplay, but I can confirm that mplayer will work for this purpose too. The second example is with mplayer, first with ffplay because I prefer it: Using ffplay, I do this to both watch and play video: wget -O - http://site.com/video.avi | tee cameravideo.avi | ffplay - this first uses 'wget' to start downloading the video (and the -O - to output it to stdout), then 'tee (output file name)' to copy the stdout from wget to a file on your computer, as well as to keep it passing through the pipe as well, then 'ffplay -' to make ffplay view the stream. In mplayer, i do this: wget -O - http://site.com/video.avi | tee cameravideo.avi | mplayer -cache 8192 -cache-min 1 - If you don't have mplayer cache the video first it won't play it at all in my experience, and the 'cache-min 1' means that only 1% of the cache has to be full to start playing. No matter how much I increase cache-min, mplayer always stutters when I do this, so I elected to use ffplay, but in any case, both should work to some degree. If you don't like the way that mplayer handles this, switch to ffplay (part of the ffmpeg package).