On Wed, 2005-03-02 at 08:28 +0100, Eric Dondelinger wrote: $ mplayer -dumpfile <outputfile> -dumpstream <url> mencoder can do the same while recoding to a different format. Look at the "-o", "-oac" and possibly "-of" switches. The man- page is your friend. There are probably some tools that can pipe audio streams through standard unix pipes (or with "|"). But definitely take a look at gstreamer. Get version 0.8 at least. It's made for piping audio and video through filters and converters. It comes with a command-line tool called gst-launch (Debian has a good manpage for it). It lets you put together a pipeline that will be "executed". A pipeline has a source, a sink, and some elements in between. These examples from the manpage should explain it: Play the mp3 music file "music.mp3" using a libmad-based plug-in and output to an OSS device: $ gst-launch filesrc location=music.mp3 ! mad ! osssink Convert an mp3 music file to an Ogg Vorbis file: $ gst-launch filesrc location=music.mp3 ! mad ! vorbisenc ! filesink \ location=music.ogg The "spider" element converts any format to any other format using all available filters/converters. Simply play a video like this: $ gst-launch filesrc location=video.mpg ! spider ! sdlvideosink Use the gst-inspect tool (or gst-inspect-gui) to find out which attributes the elements support. There are sources and sinks that use sockets, and the manpage has an example for streaming mpeg1 video over RTP. HTH, Christian Glodt