Excessive download

originally posted by: Azureblue
a reply to: RazorV66

Giga bytes must be very cheap where you are

Xfinity's service is not really cheap, I pay pretty good money to have their service.
I have been thinking about changing lately.

originally posted by: Azureblue

thanks for that. The thing is that I only download standard definition video. Would what you have said still apply?

If you know what you're downloading, i.e. making a deliberate download of the video before watching, like with torrents, then what I said doesn't apply.

Its only if you're "streaming" the video from places like YouTube, which is also downloading, but behind the scenes into your temp folder storage area, which you don't usually see, unless you're a power user and know how to look for these things. Most people don't know what they are downloading when they stream content from the web.

You can download YouTube videos for offline watching too, with special tools, and if you use something like YTD Downloader it will let you pick the highest quality resolution video to download, which will reveal the sizes of the files. Or, you could use one of the many Browser Extensions that enable downloading from YouTube, which show you the sizes of the video in different formats, like 360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p etc..then you can "select" the smaller resolution to save bandwidth, or pick the highest resolution to see the best picture etc..at least you should be aware that the amount you download is determined automatically by the speed of your service, unless you take some particular action to control this.

The "get into PC" program you mention, is that like a remote access program so you can access you computer from elsewhere? If so, that could be doing things behind the scenes that aren't so nice. If you are connecting to the PC with the same wireless plan, then you are using 2x the data capacity when using that program.

IDK what the deal is with wireless data and how they calculate the data useage as I have found that it is always excessive as compared to my limitless DSL and cable plan. When I do a single search on Google (with adblock on) and it uses 35mb of data, I know there is something wrong with that picture.

Another issue could be that the OS or software is updating. If you recently installed some MS Office software then that can download HUGE service packs of 1-4GB depending upon what office package you installed and depending upon how it is set up, it can start the download, get 90% done, and restart from the beginning if it is disconnected or if there is a new update since the last update was initiated.

There is also something fishy with Youtube that I can't figure out when it comes to data usage. I'll load a webpage in Chrome, play a video on Youtube and my System Monitor in Linux will say that page of Chrome is using 500mb of data, while when I download the video at highest resolution and highest audio, it may only by 50-100mb in size! If I'm on a wireless plan and need to get YT videos, I copy the URL and then download the video directly and watch it on the device, not on the YT page, and it saves a TON of data, and I can watch it anytime again without having to download the content again.

The only thing that I can figure out with the high data usage on Chrome is that some videos have 3-10 different resolutions available and depending upon the speed of the browser, it will switch between them, so if the video is 80mb at full resolution, but system monitor says it is 500mb - that could be b/c it downloaded all versions of the video. Now this makes sense because the resolution streaming is a server side app, not client side, so that means that the site will decide what to send you depending upon your connection rate.