I recently needed to download a Real Media podcast. Here's what was needed:
wget the ram fileInside the ram is an rtsp URL
Using openRTSP from the debian package livemedia-utils:
openRTSP -S 0 rtsp://...Somewhere in the output file from that, is an audio tag, referring to another rtsp file.
Run mplayer against that...
mplayer -dumpstream rtsp://....
and you have an actual real media file that vlc will play. Unfortunately, mplayer doesn't (seem) to want to run faster than realtime against an rtsp url.