Aspects of the subject disclosure may include, for example, a method in which a processing system parses a network trace to collect packet information for an encrypted adaptive bite rate (ABR) video stream encoded into a plurality of tracks; detects request packets corresponding to a sequence of requests for video segments to be downloaded at a network client; and determines a traffic volume downloaded at the network client to obtain a sequence of traffic volumes. The processing system identifies, for each of the sequence of traffic volumes, a set of candidate segments each having a size meeting a size-matching criterion; selects a segment from the set of candidate segments to determine a segment sequence meeting an index-matching criterion; and infers characteristics of the sequence of traffic volumes based on the segment sequence. Other embodiments are disclosed.