YouTube Functionality

[kingsc]

So.... streaming video/audio is usually done with UDP because it's a connectionless, fire-and-forget protocol... however I watch videos on YouTube, do a netstat, and there's not one UDP connection active. Then again, I don't see any connection pointing to(by host name anyway) YouTube, UDP or TCP?

Anyone know why?

[CoffeeFiend]

Here it's not really "streaming" per se (like, as in wacthing a live event using MMS protocol or the like) so it doesn't use UDP. It's just a flash player (.swf file) that downloads a .flv file using a plain old HTTP GET (exactly the same way as your browser gets a html page or images and so on).

Most of the requests for the flv files these days seem to be made to googlevideo.com (e.g. v11.lscache6.googlevideo.com on the last one I tried).

If netstat doesn't see it, perhaps it's done downloading. I never really use netstat (wireshark is where it's at), but I looked it up, and as soon as I hit play on a vid, several entries appeared e.g. qy-in-f118:http (as in qy-in-f118.google.com), and connections to the 74.125/16 block that belongs to Google.

[kingsc]

Here it's not really "streaming" per se (like, as in wacthing a live event using MMS protocol or the like) so it doesn't use UDP. It's just a flash player (.swf file) that downloads a .flv file using a plain old HTTP GET (exactly the same way as your browser gets a html page or images and so on).

Most of the requests for the flv files these days seem to be made to googlevideo.com (e.g. v11.lscache6.googlevideo.com on the last one I tried).

If netstat doesn't see it, perhaps it's done downloading. I never really use netstat (wireshark is where it's at), but I looked it up, and as soon as I hit play on a vid, several entries appeared e.g. qy-in-f118:http (as in qy-in-f118.google.com), and connections to the 74.125/16 block that belongs to Google.

Ahhhhh! That makes perfect sense! Silly me, thanks.

I'm new to the networking side of the house so it's very interesting to me learning how all these different things operate, it's like it's own hidden little world hehe.

Yeah I've only used Wireshark once in a class so far and it was just and introduction but I here Wireshark is an awesome app to use.

Thanks!!!