Capturing flash audio streams

[penetrode]

My public broadcaster (the CBC) provides radio programming online in the form of podcasts. At the same time, broadcasts may be streamed for up to three months after the broadcast date. Strangely, though a given program might be available as a podcast, sometimes parts of it are missing from the podcast and only available in the stream.

In the past, I captured these streams using mplayer, but a couple of years ago CBC switched to Flash-based publishing. An examination of the player source code reveals that the rtmp URL is obfuscated.

Is there a simple way of getting around this so that I can capture streams again and listen to them when off-network?

For an example, have a look at http://www.cbc.ca/asithappens/episode/2013/02/27/wednesday-alison-redford-italian-election-greg-gatenby/# and click on the "Listen" link. This opens the CBC Flash audio player with a playlist.

[syn0ptik]

you could sniff with tcpdump and investigate what link used for playing audio.

[curmudgeon]

Using tcpdump is mandatory for things like this (and in this case, it reveals you have might have made some incorrect assumptions :) ).

Capturing rtmp media is a pain (and not always reliable), but in this case, I only see simple http.

Start the player after running this command: