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.



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.



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.

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

"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".