Why can't I view Flash-based videos thru a web proxy?

[cwfnetman]

We're a government organization, and require all web browsers to surf thru a proxy server due to security regulations. There exists no way on our internal network for a PC workstation or it's web browser or plugins to route traffic directly to the public Internet, nor do we have NAT access to the public Internet either.

All web browsing (including browser plugin traffic) must go thru the proxy system or it ain't allowed to go... period.

We now need to be able to access some Flash-based streaming videos from a hosting provider out there on the Internet, and none of their videos will work. The tech people at this company are morons and have zero clue what a proxy even is! When trying to open up a video on their website, a sniffer shows that the Flash player plugin is not obeying the web browser's (IE, Firefox or Chrome) proxy settings, but instead is trying to do an end-run-around the proxy and reach the public IP address of the video server out there on the Internet directly, which is impossible on our network.

Other Flash-based video service providers out there (e.g. You Tube, Hulu, etc) have no problem working thru our proxies and their videos play just fine.  In fact 99.9% of just about everything else out there on the whole web works without problem thru our proxies.

Why are some Flash videos failing to work with our environment? Is this some configuration that the streaming video service company themselves is doing that's telling the Flash player plugin to disobey the browser's proxy settings and try to go direct? Is there some local PC setting I can change to force the Flash player to use the proxy?

[chris.campbell · Accepted solution]

I'll ask around about this tomorrow, but it sounds like the stream that isn't getting through might be using RTMP.  There's no way for the player to route plain RTMP traffic through the browser proxy. By default, RTMP traffic is sent through port 1935, but browser proxies won't re-route non-HTTP traffic. This is is what the RTMPT variant does, it's traffic is routed over HTTP, and so the browser has the opportunity to route it through a proxy.

Do you have a link you can share for the problematic stream?  I'll see if there's a way to determine what kind of protocol is used.  You might also want to check out this thread which comes up when I search for proxying rtmp.  It looks like they take the sockify approach for the browser.  I've also had success with this in the past, though I used a different utility than the one described in the article.

Chris

[cwfnetman]

Thanks for the reply Chris.

I suspect our streaming video service provider / web hosting company is

probably using this direct RTMP protocol only and has not implemented

RTMPT on their end.

I've played around with sockifying stuff before.... and it's a Rube

Goldberg contraption that's not really practical for wide deployment to

ordinary users' PCs.

Perhaps we can try to convince our web hosting company to switch to RTMPT

on their end, or we'll likely have to find another streaming service

provider for our videos.