Just using Wireshark would give you all the data, but you would not be able to just hit play to watch the video. To decode them to some useful format you would probably need a special purpose built program.

On the network, capturing the packets.

The data capturing could be done on different stages. If you are worried that the server will be able to spot that you are not streaming but downloading by using some kind of heuristic, I think the solution is to simply stream instead of downloading, and then capture the data from the stream. Unfortunately (fortunately?) I have almost no experience with DRM This is less of a problem today (with HTML5 streaming implemented widely), but still a reason why so many streaming players are used.ĭisclaimer: When DRM comes into play things change.

One of the biggest reasons that people started using streaming players was to escape from using the Flash Plugin (which is famous for being particularly buggy in terms of security). But he cannot tell the difference between a streming player and a download, because the steaming player already performs the download anyway.Ĭan a website claim that stream players are the same as downloads of a video? Not really, the number of people using stream players is big, notably VLC. He can, therefore, tell is you used the browser interface to his website or a streaming player. ConclusionĪ website maintainer can tell if you looked at a webpage or not when you were watching the video.

If someone on the streaming website can look at the webserver logs he can conlude whether you saw the page through a browser or not (stream players do not have JS engines). When you watch through a browser you also see the rest of the website, the banners are fetched, the JS is executed. Therefore there is (almost) no difference between using a streaming player ( vlc or mpv) and watching from a browser. The video need to reach your machine's memory at some point to be played. When you watch a video through a browser the video is downloaded to your machine alright before being displayed.

Browser noteīut wait, when I watch a video through a browser is isn't being downloaded right? Wrong. The video is downloaded to my machine before playing. When a user types (or I do it, since I just typed this to make a test): mpv The backend supports youtube URLs by means of youtube-dl (and youtube-dl is/can be used in VLC). The backend of video display on Linux is today ffmpeg (which is used by mpv and vlc as well). The example I'll use for this argument is the way how most Linux users watch videos. How a website knows if a video has been watched or downloaded?Īnd the simple answer is: It cannot know for sure.

How download html5 video with idm