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The Difference Between Downloading and Streaming
Mostly to make use of an animation I made for a different blog post that hasn't materialised, let me take a moment to explain to you the fundamental technical difference between 'streaming' and 'downloading'. Which won't take long... because there isn't one!
Video designed for streaming will often have frequent keyframes so that a client that starts “in the middle” can decode the buffer without downloading too much data. That’s the result of your device realising that the rate at which it’s receiving data isn’t well-matched to the connection speed, and asking the server to send a different quality level. The real hackers do stuff with software, but people who just want their screens to work properly in spite of HDCP can just buy boxes like this (which I bought for a couple of quid on eBay).
Or read this on Hacker News
