This is Mur 
I am playing music from Spotify Web Player since a few hours and I see that the network monitor shows a steady flow of 180 KiB/s being sent from my computer while download is not much. The total sent data till now is 1.3GiB while the received is 417MiB.
Why and what is all this going data outside of my computer when playing spotify through web 
cc @freemo
@freemo
I still don't understand the need to send 180KiB of data constantly even though the downloading side only downloads when a new track starts to play. ACK/NACK are for confirmation of the receiving of a packet right??
🇳🇱
@mur2501 oh, yea, if it downloads up front then im not too sure. Could be some sort of on-the-fly decryption going on or something to prevent you from just saving the file in your personal library.. DRM shit.. i dunno just a guess.
@freemo
Okay I checked an Indian music service too (Jiosaavn) it also sends 180KiB of data constantly while downloading is not constant. 🤔
I think I should start learning about the protocols and inner workings of web more, any good place to start for that??
@mur2501 your likely looking at proprietary protocols, so I dont think youll find a public answer.
@freemo
Spotify sends the music in octet-stream packets of 160KB as the music plays along.
The indian music streaming site Jiosaavn directly sends the whole music file as MP4 at once which I just downloaded through the network catcher and it seems to have no DRM :D
@freemo
I wonder why they use MP4 containers
@mur2501 mp4 is fairly common and popular, no reason to go with anything else.
@freemo
Which media container you like??
@mur2501 mp4 would be my choice, though im not sure the container matters much, the compression algorithms/codecs seem to be the more important part
@freemo
what are your choices for codecs?
@mur2501 h.264 mostly.. best compression ratio. Plus all my hardware has what it takes to decode in real time so its fine.
Doesnt mean it would be a codec I'd use for a public product though as older hardware or even low-end hardware might not handle it well as it is relatively processor intensive. Thankfully most systems have hardware h.264 decoders these days.
@freemo
I don't have any technical problems with h.264 but the patents stuff related MPEG makes me vary of it 
@mur2501 why is that?
@freemo
Currently Cisco pays royalties for to MPEG for making it's Open source h.264 implementation available to all users, what if they stop paying those royalties? 
@mur2501 People will probably use it anyway, especially considering the vast majority of codecs isnt using the open-source one (like hardware)... I mean GIF is the same way, its patented but seems the world keeps on turning.
@freemo
Vast majority of people don't even know about Open Source :D
@mur2501 At a minimum you need to send data back for Ack/Nack purposes so what packets need to be resent can be computed.