Got a request today to grab a CBC video for later inclusion in a GCM DVD - similar to the last one. It was not straightforward, though. The original is a wmv file, which is actually a stream. Opening the wmv file one sees this:
<ASX version="3.0"><ENTRY><REF HREF="mms://a924.v23745c.c23745.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/924/23745/1207237657000/origin.media.cbc.ca/windows/thenational/archive/tomthomson-030208.wmv"/></ENTRY></ASX>

The useful part of this, for us, is:
mms://a924.v23745c.c23745.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/924/23745/1207237657000/origin.media.cbc.ca/windows/thenational/archive/tomthomson-030208.wmv

I was unable to find anything that just worked. I tried FFMPEGX, mencoder, vlc etc. They all work to one extent or another, but with generally bad results. So I went to my Ubuntu VM, looked through Synaptic and found mimms (MiMMS Isn't an MMS Messenger Sender, it's an MMS stream downloader).

I installed mimms and ran:
mimms mms://a924.v23745c.c23745.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/924/23745/1207237657000/origin.media.cbc.ca/windows/thenational/archive/tomthomson-030208.wmv
The app created a file on my Desktop called "tomthomson-030208.wmv" which looks just as good as the streamed source.

Now I can transcode it - I hope.