trouble playing streaming video

[Steve Kleene <skdeb@syrano.acb.uc.edu>]

I'm having trouble accessing streaming video from a local website.  If I
click on a video in iceweasel (up-to-date Lenny), I see that MPlayer-Plugin
is called, and the browser also shows:

  Connecting to server 70.61.148.132[70.61.148.132]: 80...

ps shows the following process:

mplayer -wid 0x1201a26 -vf scale=640:-3 -osdlevel 1 -nojoystick \
  -noconsolecontrols -cookies -softvol -slave -user-agent NSPlayer \
  -nomouseinput -cache 512 http://70.61.148.132/WXOD/WCT%2018120.WMV?MSWMExt=.asf

After a couple of minutes, the browser declares:

  No stream found to handle url http://70.61.148.132:80/WXOD/WCT%2018120.WMV?MSWMExt=.asf

I also tried using mplayer directly:

  mplayer http://70.61.148.132/WXOD/WCT%2018120.WMV?MSWMExt=.asf -dumpstream -dumpfile output.asf

This gives more informative errors, namely lots of the following:

  Playing http://70.61.148.132/WXOD/WCT%2018120.WMV?MSWMExt=.asf.
  Resolving 70.61.148.132 for AF_INET6...
  Couldn't resolve name for AF_INET6: 70.61.148.132
  Connecting to server 70.61.148.132[70.61.148.132]: 80...
  Cache size set to 320 KBytes

and eventually the same "No stream found ..." shown above.

I called the content provider, who said these are aimed at Windows Media
Player and that they have been dealing with recent changes to WMP.  If I
paste the URL into Explorer, it brings up WMP and plays OK.  Videos from this
site worked fine with Etch mplayer about a year ago.  The provider said that
I could try VLC, but I haven't yet.

Does the "No stream found" mean that mplayer can't play the new format, or is
it really a problem finding a stream at all?  Any ideas how to get this
working from Lenny?  Thanks.