Forum Moderators: phranque
Is my bandwidth used if a visitor plays these files in Windows Media player directly from the site?
...or is it only used when the visitor downloads the file?
any help is appriceated...
Your bandwidth is only used when the file is downloaded from your site.
In both scenarios bandwidth is being consumed. Whether the user is downloading data or streaming data from a web server, it is still basically consuming bandwith, and would therefore be metered similarly by an ISP or hosting provider for example.
Streaming the audio could potentially consume less bandwidth than an mp3 file download, if the audio stream were optimized for low bandwidth (example 28k, 56k). Then the amount of data being sent to render the song would be less then that of downloading a full sized 128kps mp3 file for example. However, the audio quality would suffer as a result.
But once a visitor informed me that he could listen (WMP) without first downloading the WAV file. I can't do that myself (2MB DSL, WMP). Could somebody please explain. Or maybe there's no time benefit if it can be done.
(Not exactly on topic, but there are so many threads already.)
I was assuming that alb_boy doesn't have a streaming server, and that downloading or opening the file are then pretty much the same thing. Playing the file again would then be working from the person's cache or download location, and not consume any bandwidth.
