success! i don't know what i did, because i didn't do anything differently... but i loaded a stream into rtmpexplorer, rtmpsrv triggered (as it did before), but continued and began downloading the stream into an .flv file that is saved once closed.
it seems too easy... is that how it should work though for downloading a stream - start
RTMPexplorer - input stream site and rtmpsrv kicks in and starts saving the .flv file?