Today I attended a lecture/demo session on "hacking" various media sites like YouTube, Hulu, last.fm. Essentially it was a practical demonstration of the cat and mouse game hackers play with content pedlars on the internet....
One of the tools mentioned was
rtmpdump ...
I decided to compile it myself from the most recent development version. If you're lazy and brave enough to trust compiled binaries and packages from third parties, go to
LinuxCentre and install
flvstreamer for your operating system. These programs were once one and so far they use the same commands. Read: they work the same.
(
Editor's note: flvstreamer doesn't support RTMPE secure streams)
These instrucitons work on
Ubuntu 9.10 (karmic) but please be aware things change rapidly so the following might not work
forever.
First of all install the tools needed for accessing the code and compilation.
Code:
sudo apt-get install build-essential gcc make subversion libssl0.9.8 libssl-dev libssl0.9.8
Now check out the
latest code from the
Subversion repository:
Code:
svn co svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/rtmpdump rtmpdump
If you prefer a
stable version, run this instead:
Code:
wget http://rtmpdump.mplayerhq.hu/rtmpdump-1.9.tgz
tar xfz rtmpdump-1.9.tgz
mv rtmpdump-1.9 rtmpdump
I'm sure the impatient are looking forward to completing this ASAP so here's the final step in setting up rtmpdump on your computer:
Code:
cd rtmpdump
make linux
The program now lies in the same folder and you can only run it by telling your shell (like bash) exactly where it is. If you're in the same folder, running it is as simple as
./rtmpdump but
./ is only short for the current folder and it gets expanded to (in my case)
/home/jasa/rtmpdump/rtmpdump.
Great! Now we need a media site which uses a Adobe's
RTMP server. I think I won't get in trouble if I use VideoLectures.net as an example. :)
Lets say I'm interested in
probability and statistics. And I want to watch these lectures offline, on a train or wherever.
Unfortunately this isn't a straightforward process and quite a bit of work is required. It is derived from a mailing list
thread.
I need to see the source code of the web page above, not the rendered output of the web browser. In Firefox press
Ctrl+U. Now I need some hard data to pass to rtmpdump. Search for a javascript section which launches the flash video player. For the statistics video this is the interesting section:
Code:
var flashvars = {
streamer: "rtmp://oxy.videolectures.net/video",
file: "2007/pascal/bootcamp07_vilanova/keller_mikaela/bootcamp07_keller_bss_01.flv",
height: '288',
autostart: "true",
bufferlength: '5',
image: "http://media.videolectures.net/play.png",
id: "FlvPlayer" // last line, no colon ',' !
};
swfobject.embedSWF("http://media.videolectures.net/jw-player/player.swf", "video_embed", "384", "307", "9.0.0", "http://media.videolectures.net/swfobject/expressInstall.swf", flashvars, params, attributes);
Generally searching (
Ctrl+F) for
flashvars should get you near the required data. The line
swfobject.embedSWF(...) causes the video player to load inside your browser and display the correct media. This media rests on a different server than the webpage and I will use rtmpdump to connect to that server instead of the flash player. Now Adobe has put some roadblocks into the process but lucky for me I have a flying car. :)
I'll just give you the final command now and explain later!
The
-r switch requires an argument which is the URL of the media server and is found in the variable
streamer in the JavaScript source code above.
The
-y switch needs the playpath and that is found in the JavaScript variable
file, (minus the extension .flv or .mp4).
The
-a switch is the name of the used player and usually automatically inferred from the URL. Defining it manually works by copying the part after the server name in the
streamer.
The
-s switch defines the flash video player which normally connects to the media server. In the example it is the first argument of the function
embedSWF.
Here's where things get even more complicated. The media server wants some extra data about this player, specifically its sha256
hash-sum and size in bytes. So lets get them:
Code:
wget http://media.videolectures.net/jw-player/player.swf
sha256sum player.swf
ls -l player.swf
Supply the sha356sum to switch
-w and the file size to the
-x switch.
Anything else? Yeah, I need to specify where to save the video with
-o.
Run the longest command ever and get yourself a beer (you've earned it)! :)
I admit that doing this for every video gets time consuming but unfortunately it is a procedure specific to every site. Look at the mailing list thread link again to see different javascript
:
Quote:
For anyone curious, I found that wisevid is using plain RTMP with SWF
verification.
This invocation works for me:
Code:
rtmpdump -r rtmp://stream1.wisevid.com/flvs -s http://wisevid.com/player.swf -y 82330 -a flvs -z -o xxx -w e09b300f1f1e2cc75878ab11258ba4c17f28a315ea9df26f67b37c7f59332737 -x 110543
Starting from this web page
Code:
http://www.wisevid.com/view_video.php?viewkey=0052slrjt6n74lz84848
The relevant information from that page is in this bit of javascript
Code:
<script type="text/javascript">
var player = null;
function playerReady(thePlayer) { player = window.document[thePlayer.id]; }
var so = new SWFObject('player.swf','mpl','570','340','9');
so.addParam('allowscriptaccess','always');
so.addParam('allowfullscreen','true');
so.addParam('wmode','transparent');
so.addParam('flashvars','&file=82330.flv&streamer=rtmp://stream1.wisevid.com/flvs&skin=http://wisevid.com/modieus1.swf&stretching=exactfit&autostart=true&abouttext=WiseVid.com&aboutlink=http://wisevid.com');
so.write('player');
</script>
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