Nothing is nuts here.
Website design is changing as time goes and nobody works on rtmpdump.
pop cartoon is admins greeting to you if you use ffmpeg.
They are finding ways to work around rtmpdump as well, but not fully successful as they would like it to be.
They would not be successful at all if somebody worked on rtmpdump yet.
They still cannot go against old ways as they were never able to without secure token.
Here I use an old browser to run rtmpsuck to get parameters.
You can use these parameters with rtmpdump and pipe output to player.
RTMP Proxy Server v2.4 GIT-2015-12-14 (Compiled by KSV)
(c) 2010 Andrej Stepanchuk, Howard Chu; license: GPL
Streaming on rtmp://0.0.0.0:1935
WARNING: Trying different position for client digest!
Processing connect
app : edge
flashVer : WIN 27,0,0,130
swfUrl :
http://newschat.tv/player.swf
tcUrl : rtmp://birds.cdn.newschat.tv/edge
pageUrl :
http://www.livenewschat.eu/international/
live : no
Playpath : cnni_live
Saving as : 2017-10-06_04-46-35_cnni_live.flv
INFO: Metadata:
INFO: Server NGINX RTMP (github.com/arut/nginx-rtmp-module)
INFO: width 640.00
INFO: height 360.00
INFO: displayWidth 640.00
INFO: displayHeight 360.00
INFO: duration 0.00
INFO: framerate 25.00
INFO: fps 25.00
INFO: videodatarate 292.00
INFO: videocodecid 7.00
INFO: audiodatarate 58.00
INFO: audiocodecid 10.00
WARNING: ignoring too small audio packet: size: 0