What does it take to correctly play AVI files on Red Hat Linux 8.0?

I downloaded, built and installed the latest avifile=20
(http://avifile.sourceforge.net) but when I go to web sites to play strea=
ms,=20
many of the stream links are "http://something.com/somestream.asf" and=20
aviplay reports that it does not support http!  So, I can't play them.

Is there an clean solution to playing AVI files/streams on Linux?

Alan