Import old blog posts

_posts/2013-04-18-how-download-rtmp-video.md

@@ -0,0 +1,92 @@
+---
+title: How to Download a RTMP Video
+layout: post
+---
+
+[RTMP or Real Time Messaging
+Protocol](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Messaging_Protocol) is a
+protocol developed by Adobe to stream Flash videos. It's currently in use by
+sites like the New York Times, ABC, NBC, Hulu, and so on. Since the video is
+streamed to the user's Flash player (in their browser) bit-by-bit, the full
+video file is never given to the user for them to keep. This is desirable to a
+lot of media companies because then they can force you to watch through ads to
+see their content and can charge you to download the full video.
+
+However, [RTMPDump](http://rtmpdump.mplayerhq.hu/), an open-source tool
+designed to intercept RTMP streams, can download the full video. 
+
+Despite  numerous “How to use RTMPDump” tutorials and forum posts coming up
+with a brief Google search, I've found a large portion of them are either
+completely incorrect or are far too complicated since they are not using the
+full toolkit that RTMPDump provides. Since it took me so long to find a decent
+procedure for downloading a RTMP video, I thought it would be worth sharing
+here.
+
+Since this is questionably legal, make sure you understand any Terms of
+Services you accepted or laws in your locality regarding this before you follow
+the steps below ;).
+
+###Have Linux### Most of these instructions will assume you have Ubuntu, but
+most distributions will work.
+
+While RTMPDump works on a variety of operating systems, I've only researched
+how to do this on Linux. Feel free to comment if you know how to do this in
+Windows or OSX.
+
+###Install RTMPDump### This open source goodness can be found at
+[http://rtmpdump.mplayerhq.hu/](http://rtmpdump.mplayerhq.hu/) or you can just
+intall it using your Linux distro's package manager. For Ubuntu, that would be
+typing the following into your terminal:
+
+    sudo apt-get install rtmpdump
+
+###Redirect ALL the RTMP!### Now we need to configure your firewall to redirect
+all RTMP traffic to a local port on your computer (Note: this will screw up any
+RTMP streaming video you try to watch on your computer, so make sure you run
+the undo command in one of the later steps to return things to normal). Type
+the following into your terminal, there should be no output from the command:
+
+    sudo iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 1935 -j REDIRECT
+
+###Run rtmpsrv### When you install `rtmpdump`, a program called `rtmpsrv`
+should have been bundled with it and installed as well. We will want to run
+this now by entering the following command in a terminal:
+
+    rtmpsrv
+
+This should output something that looks like this:
+
+    RTMP Server v2.4 (c) 2010 Andrej Stepanchuk, Howard Chu; license: GPL
+
+    Streaming on rtmp://0.0.0.0:1935
+
+###Feed rtmpsrv the Precious Video### Now go to your browser and open/refresh
+the page with the desired video. Try playing the video. If nothing happens and
+it just continues to give you a black screen, then you're on the right track:
+rtmpsrv has intercepted the video. 
+
+If you look back at the terminal that's running rtmpsrv you should see that
+some text was outputted. There is one line in this printout that we need; it
+should be a command that starts with `rtmpdump`. Copy that entire command, we
+will need it later. 
+
+You can CTRL+C out of rtmpsrv now that we have what we need.
+
+###Undo the Redirection### You must undo the iptables redirection command we
+performed earlier before you can do anything else, so run this in your
+terminal:
+
+    sudo iptables -t nat -D OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 1935 -j REDIRECT
+
+###Finally, Download the Precious Video### Now paste that command you copied
+from the rtmpsrv output in the step before last into your terminal prompt and
+hit enter. You should now see a torrent of `INFO` printout along with a
+percentage as the video is being downloaded.
+
+###Feast Eyes on Precious Video### Once downloaded, the video file, which has a
+`flv` extension and was named by the `-o` parameter in the command you copied
+and pasted, should be in your current directory (`ls | grep flv` can find it as
+well). Any video player should be able to play it, but vlc is a nice video
+player for Ubuntu.
+
+You're welcome.