using curl for "streaming" Flash movies into a file on your hard disk

Flash movies are usually thought of as being safe against being stored by the viewer. Well, that changed, when rtmpdump and other tools appeared on the scene. Actually the rtmpdump development resp. repository got hidden in a safe harbour. I wonder, how long curl's feature will survive, as the movie industry will not like that feature to be easily available, and with one of the world's best downloaders (I actually think the best), the only bits you need, are the values in  your HTML, that corespond to the host, "the app", and the playpath, and all three go into single command line argument, which is a little special. I assume, the assignment to the shell variable playpath flows into a second line. It surely shouldn't do that within your shell script.

You need a version of curl  ≥ 7.21.0 for having that feature on board.

These are sample command lines for this job:

$ playpath='mp4:videoportal/mediathek/Polizeiruf+110/c_120000/126955/format130594.f4v'

$ curl "rtmp://VOD.DasErste.de app=ardfs/ playpath=${playpath}" \

    -o "Polizeiruf_110--Aquarius.mp4.flv"


Update / 2010-07-10:
My commentator apparently experienced problems with that. I have to assume, he didn't download 7.21.0 from its usual place.