Any tool to measure progressive download of video?

Question

Can you suggest a tool(Linux based) to measure dynamically the amount of data being downloaded or buffered by a video(progressive download like Youtube video) that is being played in a browser(Mozilla).

Answer 1

ifconfig eth0:

eth0  Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr ...
      inet ...
      inet6 ...
      UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
      RX packets:9278084 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
      TX packets:4290251 errors:0 dropped:103 overruns:0 carrier:0
      collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
      RX bytes:10351665680 (10.3 GB)  TX bytes:485621573 (485.6 MB)
      Interrupt:45 Base address:0xc000 

Make sure that the browser is the only thing that's running and the measurement should be pretty accurate.

There are other tools like lsof(8) but those don't work well with browsers since the browser doesn't have to keep a connection open, so the output will change all the time and you'll lose data when the connection is closed.

Or you can install a local proxy server like squid and enable statistics for it.