Home caching service/device for videos

[Ginger_]

So quick rundown,  here's my situation. I have 6 amazon Fire tablets that I run either Swagbucks or perk.tv all day on, making me money off of the ads. Back when I started at only 2 devices I had no problem running them and all my other devices with no problem, but as they made enough money I expanded how many I have til now I'm at 6, and it's slowing down my network too much. Also unfortunately I live in the country and the fastest non satellite speeds I can get is 10 Mbps.

 

So my thinking for relieving the bandwidth a bit is a caching device, service, whatever. For the most part they will just play the same 20 or so videos and ads all day, so it's not really a lot. 

 

Does anyone know how I could set something like this up? 

[themctipers]

probably not, as each ad is new compared to the older ones, and caching it wouldn't help as there would be a lot of different ads that will only play once or so

 

or its literally looping each ad over and over again, which you would have to point that ad to your server, and well i dont think that would register as an ad view.

[Ginger_]

1 minute ago, themctipers said:

probably not, as each ad is new compared to the older ones, and caching it wouldn't help as there would be a lot of different ads that will only play once or so

 

or its literally looping each ad over and over again, which you would have to point that ad to your server, and well i dont think that would register as an ad view.

They are the same ads, every few days a new one comes into the mix but if I had to guess there's probably 10 total that loop.

 

I was a bit under the impression they woukd contact the ad server, find a local cached video file, then send a confirmation, although please correct me if I'm wrong 

[themctipers]

Just now, Ginger137 said:

They are the same ads, every few days a new one comes into the mix but if I had to guess there's probably 10 total that loop.

 

I was a bit under the impression they woukd contact the ad server, find a local cached video file, then send a confirmation, although please correct me if I'm wrong 

the app is either doing what you said which would maybe put the load at 0.5Mbit (to ping servers and say hey im playing this ad that was locally cached) or it would load the ad every single time which would saturate your bandwidth

 

sounds like its loading the ad off of a server every single time.

[MrKickkiller]

1 minute ago, Ginger137 said:

They are the same ads, every few days a new one comes into the mix but if I had to guess there's probably 10 total that loop.

 

I was a bit under the impression they woukd contact the ad server, find a local cached video file, then send a confirmation, although please correct me if I'm wrong 

This would only really work if those videos are cacheable even. Not every page/resource is guaranteed to be cacheable. It is possible that the video request comes back with Cache-Control: no cache headers. That would mean no intermediary (not your isp and not you) are allowed to cache the video(fragment). Try to figure out if that's the case first.

[Ginger_]

4 minutes ago, themctipers said:

the app is either doing what you said which would maybe put the load at 0.5Mbit (to ping servers and say hey im playing this ad that was locally cached) or it would load the ad every single time which would saturate your bandwidth

 

sounds like its loading the ad off of a server every single time.

I know the tablets do cache some, after a couple months I have to clear all the app caches as they fill all 8gb of the fire tabs, but obviously not all of them are cached. 

 

5 minutes ago, MrKickkiller said:

This would only really work if those videos are cacheable even. Not every page/resource is guaranteed to be cacheable. It is possible that the video request comes back with Cache-Control: no cache headers. That would mean no intermediary (not your isp and not you) are allowed to cache the video(fragment). Try to figure out if that's the case first.

I didn't even know there were ads that would come in as uncachable, although I would take an educated guess that the retarded interactive mobile strike ads that don't auto close and will ruin a night's profits, and similar interactive ones aren't. 

[MrKickkiller]

2 minutes ago, Ginger137 said:

I didn't even know there were ads that would come in as uncachable, although I would take an educated guess that the retarded interactive mobile strike ads that don't auto close and will ruin a night's profits, and similar interactive ones aren't. 

This doesn't simply conform to ads. This is a HTTP protocol element. Certain assets (Stylesheets, Javascripts) are generally static and can therefor be cached without trouble. Yet, it is also possible to define that certain video resources are cacheable, non cacheable, semi cacheable (only valid for short period of time) etc. It's up to the person hosting the content to provide the system details on what can be cached.

 

Eg: If you open up chrome dev-tools, and navigate to the network tab, you can navigate / see all the specific requests your browser makes for content. If you view the details on a request, you can see where it came from (web, disk cache, memory cache) and what headers came with it. Things as profile pics (On LTT site) etc are generally associated with being cacheable by any server. Yet the html of the page is strictly non-cacheable. If the html were cacheable, It would mean that any new post made on the site would only show up on my screen if I force-refresh OR the previous cached page expires.

[Ginger_]

18 minutes ago, MrKickkiller said:

This doesn't simply conform to ads. This is a HTTP protocol element. Certain assets (Stylesheets, Javascripts) are generally static and can therefor be cached without trouble. Yet, it is also possible to define that certain video resources are cacheable, non cacheable, semi cacheable (only valid for short period of time) etc. It's up to the person hosting the content to provide the system details on what can be cached.

 

Eg: If you open up chrome dev-tools, and navigate to the network tab, you can navigate / see all the specific requests your browser makes for content. If you view the details on a request, you can see where it came from (web, disk cache, memory cache) and what headers came with it. Things as profile pics (On LTT site) etc are generally associated with being cacheable by any server. Yet the html of the page is strictly non-cacheable. If the html were cacheable, It would mean that any new post made on the site would only show up on my screen if I force-refresh OR the previous cached page expires.

Hmm... Maybe I'll run Wireshark on one or two of them later to see what the traffic looks like. I never even thought to check that sort of thing

[Falconevo]

Wireshark won't give you caching information, if the request is via HTTP/HTTPS then you need to check the cache-control header.  Hit F12 within the Chrome Browser and then locate the page the ad is present on, then check the Browser Tools to look for the cache-control header information.

 

 

[Ginger_]

18 minutes ago, Falconevo said:

Wireshark won't give you caching information, if the request is via HTTP/HTTPS then you need to check the cache-control header.  Hit F12 within the Chrome Browser and then locate the page the ad is present on, then check the Browser Tools to look for the cache-control header information.

 

 

The ads are running on either the Swagbucks or perk apps on my tablets, so I cant view the cache info via Chrome. I was thinking I could monitor them with Wireshark to see what they are requesting, then I can figure out what is cached and what isn't. 

[Falconevo]

13 minutes ago, Ginger137 said:

The ads are running on either the Swagbucks or perk apps on my tablets, so I cant view the cache info via Chrome. I was thinking I could monitor them with Wireshark to see what they are requesting, then I can figure out what is cached and what isn't. 

Ah I see, I thought you already knew the URL they are accessing for content.

If you can specify a proxy on the device, it may be worth setting up a squid proxy and pulling all the URL information that way transparent to the client (subject to being HTTP requests).

 

I could provide you with temporary access to a HTTP/HTTPS proxy in the UK and give you the logging information if this would be helpful.  Happy to provide you the full logs if that will help you get to the bottom of it.