iptables rtmpsuck rtmpdump mplayer

05 May 2013

i always forget this stuff, but it’s useful when i want to watch stream in mplayer (which means i can put it on my tv or projector).

first, a history of recent commands used to watch a baseball game.

~$ sudo iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 1935 -m owner \! --uid-owner root -j REDIRECT
~$ sudo rtmpsuck 
~$ sudo iptables -t nat -D OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 1935 -m owner \! --uid-owner root -j REDIRECT
~$ rtmpdump -r rtmp://184.75.220.138/cdnlive -a cdnlive -y 2oneh -W http://static.bublu.pw/player/player4.0.swf -p 'http://www.bublu.pw/embed.php?v=2oneh&vw=660&vh=420' -f 'LNX 11,2,202,280' | mplayer -

now what do they mean.

the iptables is taking all traffic to port 1935 and will change the destination to the local machine for everyone except root. so then, rtmpsuck, the rtmp proxy, is run as root. then all you do is open up the webpage with the stream you want. if you run under a user other than root (and you should), then the rtmp stream gets sent to the proxy (via iptables), and the proxy sniffs out the details and reports them to the console. since it is run as root, it can then reach the final destination and you should be able to see the stream in the webpage. rtmpsuck will show something like:

~$ sudo rtmpsuck 
RTMP Proxy Server v2.4
(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: redirect
flashVer: LNX 11,2,202,280
swfUrl: http://static.bublu.pw/player/player4.0.swf
tcUrl: rtmp://live.bublu.pw/redirect
pageUrl: http://www.bublu.pw/embed.php?v=2oneh&vw=660&vh=420
ERROR: WriteN, RTMP send error 9 (16 bytes)
ERROR: RTMP_ReadPacket, failed to read RTMP packet header
Closing connection... done!

WARNING: Trying different position for client digest!
Processing connect
app: cdnlive
flashVer: LNX 11,2,202,280
swfUrl: http://static.bublu.pw/player/player4.0.swf
tcUrl: rtmp://184.75.220.138/cdnlive
pageUrl: http://www.bublu.pw/embed.php?v=2oneh&vw=660&vh=420
Playpath: 2oneh
Saving as: 2oneh
INFO: Metadata:
INFO:   author                
INFO:   copyright             
INFO:   description           
INFO:   keywords              
INFO:   rating                
INFO:   title                 
INFO:   presetname            Custom
INFO:   creationdate          Sun May 05 18:20:13 2013
INFO:   videodevice           Hauppauge Cx23100 Video Capture
INFO:   framerate             30.00
INFO:   width                 512.00
INFO:   height                288.00
INFO:   videocodecid          avc1
INFO:   videodatarate         500.00
INFO:   avclevel              31.00
INFO:   avcprofile            77.00
INFO:   videokeyframe_frequency2.00
INFO:   audiodevice           Microphone (4- USB Headphone Se
INFO:   audiosamplerate       22050.00
INFO:   audiochannels         1.00
INFO:   audioinputvolume      4.00
INFO:   audiocodecid          .mp3
INFO:   audiodatarate         32.00
WARNING: ignoring too small audio packet: size: 0
^CCaught signal: 2, cleaning up, just a second...

then after we have gotten this information, kill the rtmpsuck process, and delete the iptables rule we made earlier.

using the fields above as variables, we can construct the rtmpdump command that pipes to mplayer and shows up on our screen:

~$ rtmpdump -r $tcUrl \
            -a $app \
            -y $PlayPath \
            -W $swfUrl \
            -p $pageUrl \
            -f $flashVer | mplayer -

this should work for just about any stream.