Does YouTube stream Videos via TCP?

tcp youtube stream udp rtsp
Sebastian picture Sebastian · Oct 27, 2013 · Viewed 40.8k times · Source

I just sniffed some traffic using wireshark and noticed, that the YouTube traffic relies on TCP. I thought, they were using UDP? But it seems like as if they would use HTTP octet streams. Is YouTube really using TCP for streams or am i missing something?

Answer

David Schwartz picture David Schwartz · Oct 27, 2013

Because they need everything TCP provides (slow start, transmit pacing, exponential backoff, receive windows, reordering, duplicate rejection, and so on) they would either have to use TCP or try to do all those things themselves. There's no way they could do that better than each operating system's optimized TCP implementation.

Related questions

How can I connect to Android with ADB over TCP?

I am attempting to debug an application on a Motorola Droid, but I am having some difficulty connecting to the device via USB. My development server is a Windows 7 64-bit VM running in Hyper-V, and so I cannot connect directly …

Read More
Who is listening on a given TCP port on Mac OS X?

On Linux, I can use netstat -pntl | grep $PORT or fuser -n tcp $PORT to find out which process (PID) is listening on the specified TCP port. How do I get the same information on Mac OS X?

Read More
java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused

I'm trying to implement a TCP connection, everything works fine from the server's side but when I run the client program (from client computer) I get the following error: java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(Native …

Read More