[MPlayer-users] playing content from ibm videocharger servers?

[D Richard Felker III]

Is anyone familiar with the protocol used by IBM "videocharger"
servers? There's a great deal of video material online at
www.researchchannel.org which I'd like to be able to obtain in high
quality form. Low quality streams are available as wmv1 via normal
http, but the high quality 5.6 mbit mpeg2 streams use some lame ibm
"videocharger" protocol. I grabbed:

http://vc-win-1.cac.washington.edu/lantv/cgi-bin/iscpfsel.exe?asset=uva_nplc9_dalai_m2_56m_mpg

and obtained the following:

 [ivs_session_begin]
 version=3
 passticket=1000
 protocol=1
 serveraddr=140.142.8.90:8500
 codepage=1
 numberstreams=1
 sessiontype=1
 dataprotocol=3
 sourceaddr=0.0.0.0:0
 [ivs_session_end]
 [ivs_stream_begin]
 title=uva_nplc9_dalai_m2_56m_mpg
 longname=uva_nplc9_dalai_m2_56m_mpg
 length=4544
 mediatype=33554433
 bitrate=5600000
 autoplay=1
 invalidcommands=0
 filesize64=0,3180834820
 [ivs_stream_end]

It looks like it should be pretty straightforward, but I don't know
how to make a request to the server at 140.142.8.90:8500. It doesn't
seem to speak anything like http, at least.

Has anyone encountered this mess before? Are there any tools available
already?

Rich