Trouble recording an FLV stream via RTMP - interesting challenge for advanced users

Hey everyone -

I've recently found a site that streams FLV video via RTMP and I wanted to capture a bit of it but have been unable to. I've read over a bunch of these threads, followed advice, tried out lots of different software, and I'm pretty frustrated. I'm fairly tech-savvy but maybe someone here has some more detailed knowledge that can help.

The site streams the video using a custom SWF file. None of the listening software (WM Recorder, Orbit Downloader, urlsniffer2, Replay Media Catcher) ever found a URL, but I decompiled the SWF file and looked at the tcpdump and figured out what RTMP url it's actually fetching.

Unfortunately, the only software that actually records RTMP AND lets me enter in a URL manually appears to be Orbit. But when I try, it connects to the URL and then seems to disconnect a second later. The log looks like this:

2008-04-17-12:11:39 Connecting some.server.com:1935
2008-04-17-12:11:40 Connected
2008-04-17-12:11:40 Wait for Retry (5S)

So clearly it was able to connect but then didn't like what it got. Is there any way to get more diagnostic information on this?

I also noticed the SWF file is making a bunch of remote calls to the server - is it possible these are required in order for the server to properly stream the video, i.e. the only way to actually get the server to stream the video over the RTMP url is to make some series of other method calls, in which case these recording tools will fail? There doesn't appear to be anything else odd about the SWF though - it's constructing an RTMP url and then fetching it like so:

var nc = new NetConnection();
nc.connect("rtmp://some.server.com/some/path/ABCDEF");
// ... waits for connection to succeed
var ns = new NetStream(nc);
video.attachVideo(ns);
attachAudio(ns);

Thanks for the help.

Can you post or PM the URL of the web-page where I can find this streaming video?

[mattp]

I have had a similar problem with the same error messages, but I am not tech-savvy at all so didn't know what to do either!

Originally Posted by mattp

I have had a similar problem with the same error messages, but I am not tech-savvy at all so didn't know what to do either!

Please give a more detailed description of your problem. If you could post a link to the streaming video you had problem with, it would be much easier to provide some sort of solution.