rtmpdump

Cause merry mayhem by voting for rtmpdump as "Best Multimedia"

Nominating rtmpdump for "Best Multimedia" project had the desired effect
of getting it up as a finalist.  Vote here for rtmpdump:


Why I, Adobe, Should Stop Peddling DRM
DRM does not work and you, Adobe, were foolish enough to drink the
cool-aid.  DRM does not work for many reasons:

DRM and mass-distribution are mutually exclusively incompatible.
A maths joke i saw once goes, "Security tends to zero as the number of idiots tends to infinity". The thing is: it's true! It only takes one person to screw up, and it's Game Over.
Do a maths experiment. Take any number (1,000; 1,000,000), and put it through this formula: Probabilty = (1-(1/N)) to the power of N. What you're doing is this: if the probability of DRM _not_ being bypassed by one person is 0.999999, and you have a million such people, the probability that DRM remains secure against a million people is 0.999999 multiplied one million times. It comes out, every time, at around 36.7%. The moment that you go up by another factor of ten in the number of people, but leave the "bypassing" probability the same (e.g 0.999999 multiplied ten million times), you can see instantly that things fall apart. In this simple example (0.9999999 multiplied ten million times) the probability of DRM remaining secure is: 0.05%. That's Zero Point Zero Five Percent. near as damnit: zero. Can you see, Adobe, how DRM is therefore clearly mathematically incompatible with mass-distribution?
Water flows downhill. If you add in difficult prohibitive measures which restrict peoples' choices and freedom to choose, they simply go with the next easiest option.
Money talks. If you add in expensive "we don't trust you" hardware, the cost of the extra silicon, and the requirement to have more expensive CPUs running the paranoia distrusting encryption system... all that happens is that people go, "why is this more expensive compared to this cheap Korean trash? and what is this my friends say about having to throw away all their existing older equipment?"
Let's say that you decide to make actual secure DRM instead of "fake" secure DRM, by utilising actual passwords (e.g. PIN numbers), and putting in place Public Key Infrastructure. All you've done is increase the barrier to acceptance, and again increased the cost! People will forget their passwords. They'll ask their friends to record the show and send them a copy.
The complexity of deployment of DRM increases the time-to-market of a solution, making it uncompetitive.

From every perspective, DRM is a failure. From a simple mathematical perspective, DRM is a failure. From a psychological perspective, DRM is a failure. From a technical perspective, DRM is a failure. From a financial perspective for the users, DRM is a failure. In a competitive market, DRM is a failure. The solution: you just have to go with the flow, accept the reality and work with people's desires and abilities and financial budget, providing them with the easiest and affordable technical solution to get them their content and the multimedia interaction that they desire. By being the easiest to work with (which other than your support of DRM, Adobe, it does have to be said that your products are by far and above the easiest way to present multimedia) you automatically gain market share. The sooner you, Adobe, and your customers, accept this reality, the quicker that everyone can get down to the business of developing exciting technology (such as RTMFP) that is actually useful to people. RTMP RTMP is an important network protocol which is utilised to communicate audio and video. Adobe, you have no right to restrict internet communication or to tell people how they can and cannot communicate, or in what format, and can go fuck yourselves if you think that you can bully people into submitting via a blunt instrument called the "Digital Millenium Copyright Act", a law which should never have been allowed to have been bought into U.S. law in the first place. RTMPE RTMPE is an extension to RTMP to include encryption of content. A clean-room specification is available here. Please distribute freely and widely. Please implement and distribute free software source code implementations even wider. Note to Adobe: fuck you and your attempts to call the use of industry standard crypto primitives "proprietary". Download rtmpdump 1.9 Source code Source code of rtmpdump v1.9 is available here. A lovely November 2009 "Friday 13th" release. Download rtmpdump 1.6 Source code Source code of rtmpdump v1.6, with the get_iplayer application removed (because i don't like the idea of providing people with the means to rip off copyright content), is available here. There is also a bittorrent tracker running: here's the rtmpdump v1.6 torrent Unpacked source (for the adventurous) Why would I remove get_iplayer yet still provide the source to rtmpdump? get_iplayer is utilised to make copies of copyright material. encouraging people to do that is stupid. by contrast: rtmpdump is one of the VERY few free software implementations of a really important networking protocol, implementations of which I have been hunting down and looking for, for a considerable amount of time. my interest in RTMP is to encourage the creation of free software real-time audio/video communication software, and, as you can see from e.g. Red5, there do exist implementations, just very few of them.

Red5 only contains a server-implementation (in java).
The python project rtmpy aims to be a free software implementation of an RTMP library, whilst Tape intends to be a full streaming server (in Python). rtmpy is in active development.
There is a java client implementation of RTMP, called Flazr. As of 2nd June 2009 (just two weeks after Adobe issued the take-down notice), Flazr also has RTMPE support. Congratulations to Peter, and thank you to Adobe: none of this would have remotely happened, if you hadn't brought RTMPE to people's attention.
SWFDec has a partial and experimental implementation of RTMP. swfdec is client-only.
Gnash has a partial and experimental implementations of RTMP. Gnash has both client and server, sharing the same common source. Cygnal is making particularly good progress, as a server: video can already be streamed from it, with real-time video planned for Q3 2009.
libRTMP by boxee contains an RTMP client library, and was used as the basis for rtmpdump.
haxeVideo is a server implementation of RTMP in Haxe.
crtmpserver is a server implementation of RTMP that has implemented (as of 25th may 2009) the RTMPE protocol.
Mammoth, formerly known as OpenFMS, is a server implementation that has implemented an RTMPE-compatible algorithm known as "H264-compatible and DH handshaking".
RubyIzumi is an implementation of an RTMP server in Ruby.

Throwing out the baby with the bathwater, by going after free software developers with a DMCA take-down notice, is just stupid. Translation: "Adobe - get fucked". Proprietary Implementations For fits and giggles, here are a few fun items involving proprietary implementations:

Applian caved in and agreed:
"We have resolved a dispute with Adobe Systems Incorporated, [...], by agreeing not to circumvent any Secure RTMP Measures developed by Adobe."
Well, that was stupid of you - you lent weight to Adobe's belief that you were actually doing any circumventing, and to their belief that there is anything "secure" about Adobe's RTMP "measures". So, Applian - go right ahead and put RTMPE right back in, because you will still be complying with your agreement with Adobe. The minute that they actually put any secure RTMP measures in, then you might get left behind, compared to all of the Free Software implementations that are being created, but hey: you can always fix that by just releasing the source code of your application and then contacting the Software Freedom Law Centre, if you ever hear from Adobe again.
Smaxe java client, for research purposes. Hmm, that means he can't apply to the softwarefreedom.org for help if he gets smaxed with a DMCA takedown notice, can he.

Translation (sing along if you like): "Adobe come and geeet uuus, Adobe ..." Is the RTMP protocol documented anywhere? Yes. Just not by Adobe. Here is a list of web sites that document the RTMP protocol:

Translation: "Adobe - go fuck your proprietary implementation" Is this server in the United State? It's in Maidenhead, UK. So, no. It isn't. Translation: "Adobe - fuck off". Analysis of RTMPE RTMPE is definitely not a "Copyright Protection" mechanism. An analysis of RTMPE (see "Analysis" section) shows that RTMPE does nothing more than what SSL already does (provide end-to-end secrecy, except without the protection against man-in-the-middle attacks - RSALabs on DH, para 5) and simply mathematically links a publicly-downloadable and publicly-obtainable SWF file to the connection. Bottom line: All the information required to obtain the content is publicly available. There is no "security". If the information isn't publicly available (such as the SWF file to be executed in the web browser) then the content cannot be obtained, either. Unfortunately, this leaves Adobe in the shit, if they've been claiming that SWF verification is somehow "secure". Anyone reading this who has bought into Adobe Technology on the basis of "security" or "protection" is advised to initiate legal action against Adobe, seeking compensation and damages for deceiving them about the level of "protection" of their Copyright material. From Adobe's Web Site:

'(swf verification) ensures that only your SWF or AIR files can connect to your application or content on Flash Media Server'.

This is false. The correct interpretation is:

"if anyone can obtain the publicly-available SWF or AIR file (or a hash of it, and knows the SWF or AIR file's size) they can also connect to your application or content".

Translation: "Adobe, you fucked yourselves, royally, without anyone's help." Are there any 'encryption' keys in RTMPE? No, there are no encryption keys in RTMPE. There are however three magic constants which are used as input. And, remember, also, the publicly accessible SWF file - the one which you put on the web site to view the content - is used as input to the algorithm as well (or, at least, its hash and its size). So if you want to get genuinely stupid, and consider the sentence "Genuine Adobe Flash Player 001" to be a quotes key quotes, then by that definition, so is the publicly accessible SWF file also a quotes encryption key quotes. This raises some hilarious implications:

how can you claim that a key is secret, yet make it publicly available on the internet?
if you want to keep this "key" secret, surely you should go after all web browser distributors, and everyone who has HTTP cacheing technology, DEMANDING that they "protect" - remove - SWF files from caches.

This latter is quite easily achieved. you just block *.swf files. Actually, all Free Software HTTP Proxy and Web Browser projects should not risk being subjected to DMCA takedown notices and should block all swf files, just to be on the safe side. ... after all, it's not like they can analyse the content being streamed by the SWF file, because that would require either reverse-engineering the SWF file on-the-fly in order to find out if it uses RTMPE, or setting up a complex system of analysing network traffic (again, which would be, like, illegal, like, cos you'd have to, like actually identify RTMPE and would need to, y'know, know the algorithm?). Presumably, though, on detection of RTMPE, then, well, by that time, it's too late: the browser will have already received and be executing the SWF file. So, presumably, right, like that joke computing language which had a "GO FROM" statement and an "IF THEN ELSE UNLESS" construct, you'd have to somehow undo the past, and, presumably, if that wasn't possible, try to hide the fact that you were unable to predict the future, by deleting incriminating evidence from the user's machine and then crashing it. Who else is hosting the RTMPE source code? Anyone else who would like to be added to this list, contact me via the methods shown on my main page. You will be expected to indicate that you do not encourage copyright infringement.

http://www.megashare.com/935955
mirror (thanks seth)
mirror (thanks mr pigeon)
RTMPE spec (thanks zapto)
mirror (thanks emdx)
mirror (thanks phil)
RTMPE spec (thanks pavel)
Gallery of Adobe Remedies (thanks to Prof. Dave Touretzky)

Bittorrent sites hosting torrents for the rtmpdump v1.6 source code. These have sprung up instantly, the moment that the slashdot article appeared online. Ain't ya just gotta love that "fuck you, Adobe" attitude...

Authoritative Opinions on Adobe's actions Even my seven-week-old daughter is able to give her valuable and authoritative opinion of Adobe's decision to use the DMCA to restrict Software Freedom: