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Comment by strickjb9 | Hacker News Reader

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strickjb9·

No, you are thinking of TCP. This is an article about HTTP. (in terms of bandwidth, HTTP ⊆ TCP)

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Pretty sure YouTube is transported over HTTP. Not sure about Netflix but I wouldn't be surprised.

HTTP has become a generic TCP wrapper for the common request->response pattern.

Wireshark doesn't think so:

9792 42.750939000 74.125.109.232 10.1.1.21 TCP 1506 [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]

Dunno, I tried loading a YouTube page and capturing packets. Only ports in use were 443 and 80, even to the cdn-like hostnames (bla.c.youtube.com). First packet shows "GET /videoplayback?...."

A port number is just a port number, it doesn't define what protocol is in use. You can serve different protocols across it - the limitation is that generally you can only have one service listening on a port number. A youtube page will require a couple of different protocols.

Youtube uses RTMP on port 80.

RTMPT is RTMP over HTTP, but Youtube doesn't use it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Messaging_Protocol

It is not transported over HTTP, although it does make use of HTTP at the Application Layer. It is transported over TCP, which is a Transport Layer protocol.

Yes, I'm being pedantic and annyoing.

People are using HTTP as a transport layer, e.g., websockets.

Websockets are the transport layer, built over TCP. Websockets happens to use HTTP as a protocol. That doesn't mean HTTP is the transport layer.

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