Watch vid at same time you download it, are you using twice the bandwidth?

[gumbygum]

After I start downloading a video, I generally can close the browser tab where it is playing and the download continues.

But if I let it continue playing in the tab, am I using twice the bandwidth, hence slowing down the download? Or are the download and the stream sharing the same data?

Thanks for answers.

[butterw]

the way you describe it: twice the bandwidth.

[darkknight145]

You can simply check this yourself in windows. Just open task manager, select performance tab and click on Ethernet to display network usage.

[Cornucopia]

Watching a web video live, aka streaming DOES indeed download the video to your computing device before you see it. The difference between true streaming and progressive downloading and watching then is that true streaming is designed to be a "just-in-time" method (which usually doesn't save anything to your harddrive permanently). And so you can watch almost immediately after clicking Play, rather than waiting for the download to finish. And it's not so much a change in the size as a change in the ordering of the bits.

But either one is likely to use up the same bandwidth, and so if you are clicking "play" as well as clicking "download", and it is clear you could have just done one of those alone, that pretty much indicates that you are using double the bandwidth.
How does/would the computer know you are using what you think of as the same stream?

Scott

[jagabo]

Download to a transport stream. Then you can play the transport stream locally while the video is still downloading. See this thread:

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/397116-How-to-downlod-live-streaming-video-from-youtube