Can using RDP reduce data usage?

Question

In my home i have internet connection(50 mbps) with a data limit of 100GB. Suppose if i am outside with my laptop or mobile and i have very less speed and data usage limit than at my home. I am thinking that if i use RDP to connect to my home i can use my home internet connection and data without exhausting the data on my mobile if i do it directly on my mobile or laptop outside.

example : If i watch a movie of 1 GB on my mobile it will consume data of 1GB on mobile itself so i am thinking of connecting to my home PC via RDP and watch it which will only consume data on my home PC and not much the mobile data. The same would go for reading emails ,browsing etc.

Please clarify my doubts.

Solution

The consideration here is what quality you want the video at. In order to stream it to you with the same quality and frame rate, you'd likely end up using more bandwidth, as you're transmitting more than just the video itself.

Usually bandwidth is saved using RDP as most of the screen isn't updated and doesn't need to be retransmitted. However, watching a video will require constant repainting of the area with the video. To get the result of lower bandwidth, the client would reduce the amount of redraws, making the video very hard to watch and more like a slideshow. If you tell it to use maximum quality, then you'd be better off streaming it directly.

There is a fairly similar question here which looks at the bandwidth usage whilst watching YouTube, which is no more efficient than just streaming it directly.

That said, non-video operations could result in less bandwidth usage. Reading the attachments of very large emails may result in less usage, depending on the attachment type, as you're not transmitting the whole file, but a rendered output of it.

Comments

[TamusJRoyce]

The actual difference is video streaming (youtube) vs. sending pre-rendered commands (outlook email - mainly text with descriptions how to render). RDP, XDMCP, and similar technologies send pre-rendered desktop commands (e.g. left,top,right,bottom coordinates + color of a window instead of each individual pixel). VNC, TeamViewer, etc. sends everything after it is rendered. Video is already in pixels. So RDP can't do anything special to use less bandwidth.