Saving a Real Media Stream

Recently I wanted to save a Real Media video stream so I can see it later on another computer. I was using a amd64 Ubuntu and I could not even see the stream since there is no 64 Real Player (or codecs). After a bit of googling and some trial and error I managed to save the stream using mplayer. Here is the command:
$  mplayer -dumpstream rtsp://example.com/path/clip.rm -dumpfile clip.rm

Some servers allow http access to the same file, so first just replace rtsp with http and try this url in a browser or with wget.

The .rm url in most cases is wrapped in a play list with the extension .ram. Just save the .ram file locally and open it in an editor, you will see the rtsp .rm url there.

Needles to say, use your own judgement if this is legal or not. It depends on the stream and country where you are located.

I found the above mplayer command in the Gentoo HOWTO Rip Streams With MPlayer.

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Anonymous says:

Thanks for this!

After my own experiments, I found that you should add the flag "-bandwidth 16000000" in order to prevent mplayer from throttling the download speed.

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