Can you tell by the network traffic whether a video was watched or downloaded from YouTube?

Posted by humanityANDpeace on Super User See other posts from Super User or by humanityANDpeace
Published on 2012-11-10T15:35:54Z Indexed on 2012/11/10 23:03 UTC
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video

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download

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youtube

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traffic

My question is about quite popular YouTube downloaders like youtube-dl (a command line program) or VideoDownloadHelper (a Firefox-browser extension).

Comparing two cases:

Watching a video on YouTube
Download the video using a downloader (to be specific let's assume youtube-dl)

Is it possible to tell – for instance by inspecting the network traffic – that the video was downloaded and not "only watched" on YouTube?

Maybe one could compare network traffic using programmes like Wireshark? I cannot do that myself, but maybe this will help somebody to answer the question.

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