I was kinda bummed that I had to use Windows to save audio/video streams to disk with StreamBox VCR. I wanted an app to use on my Mac to do this. People suggested stuff like WireTap which simply hijacks the system's sound before it hits the speaker (or some such). Then I found that
mplayer, which can do the trick, has been ported to OS X. You will need the command line version to do this. But the syntax is:
% mplayer -dumpfile outputfile -dumpstream streamurl
Example:
% mplayer -dumpfile some_wm_file.wmv -dumpstream mms://some.stream.here
It works!
[
robg adds: This hint also works for RealMedia (.rm) files -- ie RealMedia and RealVideo.]