seems like we may have some respite.. just hit upon the kplayer page. this is what it says,
Another area where KPlayer excels is seamless use of KDE I/O Slaves to access various kinds of media through that system. For example, to play a file over a secure shell connection, open the fish:/ URL in Konqueror, find your file, and KPlayer will play it just as if it were a normal local file.
_If you need to play a remote file over HTTP that is password protected, tell KPlayer to use the HTTP I/O Slave, and it will pop up the standard login dialog for you to enter your user name and password, and play your file straight from the web server without storing it on your hard drive._
_source_: http://kplayer.sourceforge.net/
gonna give it a try.. hope it works..
ps: package not in the official repositories, you can either add the kplayer repo location to your sources file or download the deb package from their page.