Network handling

StreamFlow contains network checks designed to prevent downloads from starting while the machine is offline and to make downloads more tolerant of temporary connectivity loss.

Connectivity check

The connectivity utility attempts to establish a TCP connection to:

8.8.8.8:53

The default timeout is three seconds.

If the connection succeeds, the function returns:

True

Otherwise:

False

network_required

The network_required decorator wraps functions that require network access.

When the network is unavailable, the decorator waits:

5 seconds

and checks the connection again.

Conceptually:

Start
  │
  ▼
Network available?
 ├── Yes ──► execute function
 │
 └── No
      │
      ▼
   wait 5 seconds
      │
      └────► check again

Monitoring during downloads

VideoDownloader registers a progress hook with yt-dlp.

When yt-dlp reports:

downloading

StreamFlow checks network connectivity.

If the connection disappears, the downloader waits until connectivity returns.

Limitations

The network check does not verify that the target website is reachable.

It only verifies that the configured TCP endpoint can be reached.

Therefore, it is possible for:

• the general internet connection to work while the target service is unavailable;
• the target service to work while the connectivity test fails because of local firewall or network restrictions.

Why this approach is used

Long-running downloads can be affected by temporary connectivity issues.

Waiting instead of immediately terminating the operation can make the application more resilient in unstable network environments.