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Lov Verma
Lov Verma

Reputation: 238

Bytes of data consumed

Is the data consumed while watching a video on online same as compared to the case when we download the video?

Note: Provided all the background applications are not consuming any data.

Thanks in advance..!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 682

Answers (1)

Mick
Mick

Reputation: 25491

Not necessarily.

If you take a video in an mp4 container as an example, i.e. an mp4 video, and just download the mp4 file itself you will use a particular number of bytes for the transfer, roughly equal to the size of the video file plus the packet overhead for each packet that is needed to download the file.

In other words, the video will be broken into packets and each packet will have some header information associated with it, all of which increases the data used to get to from the server to your device.

If you decide to stream the video, then the streaming technology will impact the bytes transferred also.

For example, if you take a simple case where you use HLS as the streaming protocol then the mp4 will be packaged into HLS and then streamed so you have another layer or headers to add to the total.

In reality, if you are using an Adaptive Bot Rate (ABR) protocol like HLS or MPEG-DASH then the original video will actually have been copied into multiple bit rate versions and the data used to download it will depend on which bit rate versions each 'chunk' of the video downloaded is.

In an extreme case, where you had poor network connections or a device with a small display for example, the device may only request 'chunks' from the lowest bit rate, In this case, the overall data used might be lower for the streamed version than the downloaded video, although it is lower because the video quality is also lower.

See here for a little more info on ABR and how you can see the video 'step' through different bit rates on YouTube: https://stackoverflow.com/a/42365034/334402

Upvotes: 1

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