YouTube background downloading gobbles bandwidth

[stu_h]

Hi.
A curious and bandwith gobbling thing I've spotted in the last few days. I first thought I had a virus.
I have the BitMeter connection monitor software running (http://codebox.no-ip.net) to monitor my traffic usage as I'm on a mobile 3G modem with a 10GB/month usage allowance. I've exceeded it more than once and needed to keep an eye on it. The software has a traffic graph that shows you in real time the download and upload traffic.
Whilst browsing YouTube I noticed that if I started to watch a video and then paused it the download traffic continued at pretty much maximum speed. This happened in Internet Explorer and Firefox. I expected the download traffic to stop as soon as I paused it. I tend to open multiple tabs in either browser whilst searching for videos so can have quite a few video pages open, all paused except for the newest.
As I said I though it was a virus and ran umpteen checkers but could find nothing that would be causing it.
I used SysInternals Filemon application to see what files were active and saw the \Local Settings\Temp folder had a .tmp file being written to. They didn't have names that pointed to anything useful. I couldn't work out what was actually writing to the file though. Filemon tells you it is Firefox or IE but I was expecting to see some sort of trojan or malware lurking.
What I have realised today is that the .tmp file is the video still being downloaded EVEN THOUGH it has been paused. I'm a little surprised by this and am wondering if it is normal and if I can stop it happening without having to close that video's browser tab. The traffic stops once the video has been fully downloaded (still whilst it is paused). If it is a large file I am wasting MBs of usage allowance downloading something that I haven't wanted to watch all the way through.
OK I can close the tab but I find it useful leaving them open so that I can backtrack through my searches.

Can anyone shed some light on what is going on and why? It just seems curious that YouTube (and maybe other sites) should operate this way.
Thanks.

 

[fini]

Yes it's normal - it's downloading the rest of the video as you should be able to see if you look at the bar. No, I don't think you can stop it.

 

[bledd]

a good way to save a fair ammount of bandwidth, is to use

adblock plus the firefox extention, and use the Easylist subscription (it asks you which one you want when you restart firefox the first time)

blocks all add banners and crap, when each one on a page is say 40kb, with multiple each page in a lot of cases, you save a measureable ammount




-it's standard for youtube to work like that, it's just caching the rest of the video, so playback isn't jerky

just avoid youtube tbh mate!

 

[stu_h]

Thanks both of you.

OK so I'm an idiot! I would have sworn that the videos were paused AND the progress bar had actually stopped..... but no. They are still downloading as Fini rightly pointed out and the progress bar is indeed still moving. I must be losing it (if I ever had it).
Thanks bledd, I will look up adblock plus and the easylist thingumy (I presume that is part of adblock?). And yes all those 40kBs can add up. I don't want to avoid YouTube as I've been finding far too many obscure music videos that I haven't seen for years. And.... err.... no.... of course I haven't downloaded and kept any!
Thanks again.