What is the status of RTMP support?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I'm reading many contradictory things on various forums and blog posts. One post on Superuser.com suggests that this has worked since 1.1, other places suggest using third party tools to pipe rtmp into VLC.

My own experiments either show I'm screwing up how to load the URLs, or that it isn't supported (even in the 2.1 beta). Can anyone give a status update?

[RobertKissel]

I've got a related question, which, perhaps, I can attach to this thread.

Background
There is a service called "Music Choice" which streams music. They happen to have one channel which I especially like, called Classical Masterpieces. It's everything I always wanted in a classical FM station: just music, with no "educational" yak-yak-yak to spoil each piece before it is played.

I used to listen to it with VLC slurping up the feed from [url]mms://arcostream-musicchoice-easylistening.wm.llnwd.net/arcostream_musicchoice_classicalmasterpieces[/url] and all was well. I even had it packaged on my Windoze desktop as a nice little point-and-grunt icon so I could turn it on and off my netbook, just like a little radio, while I was doing chores in the kitchen or something of that sort.

New! Improved!
Well, as you know, as soon as a Web entity is doing something right and making things easily accessible, it isn't long before they "improve" their interface. Alas, Music Choice has done this too.

After a LOT of fishing around, I found the "channel" I like again at at http://www.musicchoice.com/#channel/17/ ... sterpieces, which now fusses around with you logging in and telling them who your cable provider is and that sort of silliness.

Impenetrable Code
You know the drill. I then fussed around reading the impenetrable mountains of code to try to dig out the new URL to feed to VLC, and after lots of poking, I think I found it (I'm not really sure). I found this fragment:

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<param value="true" name="allowfullscreen"><param value="always" name="allowscriptaccess"> <param value="true" name="seamlesstabbing"><param value="transparent" name="wmode"> <param value="netstreambasepath=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.musicchoice.com%2F&id=audioplayer-content&autostart=true&mute=false&wmode=transparent&provider=rtmp&rtmp.subscribe=true&streamer=rtmp%3A%2F%2Ffml.0094.edgecastcdn.net%2F200094%2F&file=Masterpieces_64&controlbar.position=over&volume=60" name="flashvars">

which suggests to me that the URL I want is [url]rtmp://fml.0094.edgecastcdn.net/200094/[/url]

But No
And then, after a few tries, I realized that this wasn't going to work in VLC. I poked around on the 'net, and sure enough, read about rtmpdump and piping the output through vlc, so I went and got an executable rtmpdump and tried that:

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rtmpdump.exe -r "rtmp://fml.0094.edgecastcdn.net/200094/" -v -o - | vlc -

But no, that doesn't do it either, and indeed, VLC fails rather badly and needs to be stopped from cycling through some tight loop by killing the task altogether.

Can anybody help?
Well, I'm sort of at the limits of the research I want to do on this, because obviously, without a lot more hacking away and debugging and reading of what there is of RTMP specs to be had, and debugging the dialogue between browsers and flash players and their servers and what not, I'm obviously not going to get back to where I was happily listening via VLC to this nice selection.

I'm hoping maybe somebody here, armed with what I want and where it is, and knowing more about these streaming protocols than I want to, may be able to tell me if there's a way to get this playing through VLC so I can enjoy it--or if VLC cannot handle what they're spewing out anymore and I should give up?

One last note
when I just use rtmpdump.exe and do NOT pipe the output, I see this error:

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Z:\RTMPDUMP>rtmpdump.exe -r "rtmp://fml.0094.edgecastcdn.net/200094/" -v -o - RTMPDump v2.4 (c) 2010 Andrej Stepanchuk, Howard Chu, The Flvstreamer Team; license: GPL ERROR: You must specify a playpath (--playpath) or url (-r "rtmp://host[:port]/playpath") containing a playpath

So I'm hoping that I'm just doing something obviously stupid that I don't recognize.

Anybody have some guidance to offer me?

[Lotesdelere]

when I just use rtmpdump.exe and do NOT pipe the output, I see this error:

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Z:\RTMPDUMP>rtmpdump.exe -r "rtmp://fml.0094.edgecastcdn.net/200094/" -v -o - RTMPDump v2.4 (c) 2010 Andrej Stepanchuk, Howard Chu, The Flvstreamer Team; license: GPL ERROR: You must specify a playpath (--playpath) or url (-r "rtmp://host[:port]/playpath") containing a playpath

So I'm hoping that I'm just doing something obviously stupid that I don't recognize.
Anybody have some guidance to offer me?

It means your URL rtmp://fml.0094.edgecastcdn.net/200094/ is not complete and some parts of the full address are missing. You need to know the full URL for this command line to work.

[RobertKissel]

your URL rtmp://fml.0094.edgecastcdn.net/200094/ is not complete and some parts of the full address are missing. You need to know the full URL for this command line to work.

Thank you; that turns out to be PART of the problem. What was really necessary to get rtmpdump working properly was the explicit name of the "playpath" it seems. When I finally figured THAT out, yesterday, I was at least able to get rtmpdump to catch the output and direct it to a file.

This, now, works:

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rtmpdump -v --playpath Masterpieces_64 -r "rtmp://fml.0094.edgecastcdn.net/200094/" -o recording.flv

This, however, does not:

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rtmpdump -v --playpath Masterpieces_64 -r "rtmp://fml.0094.edgecastcdn.net/200094/" -o - | vlc

But vlc does play the flv file saved, in the first example above.

I believe I am still doing something wrong. Can anybody tell me what it might be?

[RobertKissel]

AHA!!!!!
It works as expected in (Windoze) VLC 1.1.11!

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rtmpdump -v --playpath Masterpieces_64 -r "rtmp://fml.0094.edgecastcdn.net/200094/" -o - | \path-to-vlc1111\vlc -

Up pops VLC, announcing that it's playing fd://0 (stdin) and I've got music. So apparently, this is broken in version 2.0.3.

I'll upgrade to the most recent version, since I know I'm behind, and see if that solves the problem altogether. If not, I can use VLC 1.1.11 instead for what I wish to do, and wait for a fix.

[RobertKissel]

Solved.

Yup. All my fault. Works as it should in version 2.0.7.

I guess I figured it out for myself in the end, but you know how it is. Sometimes, if you explain the problem to somebody else it gets you thinking the right way.

Forgive the intrusion on the thread.

[Lotesdelere]

The correct syntax is:

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rtmpdump -v -r "rtmp://domain.com/live/stream" -o - | "C:\Path\to\VLC.exe" -

Notice the - that comes after the final VLC.exe.
"-o -" output to stdout
"VLC -" input from stdin

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Try 2.1.0 without rtmpdump