Hacker News Reader

Comment by IngvarLynn | Hacker News Reader

One obvious issue with both these downloaders is lack of proper modularization. Which greatly hinders adoption, I believe. I would expect some kind of plugin system. Naturally, there are attempts to fix that: https://github.com/un-def/dl-plus is one example. As a bonus that would help greatly with recent youtube-dl sort of situations and RIAA would have barely made a splash.

Plenty of other features immediately come to mind as well: universal media support, proper parallelism, GUI, desktop integrations, proxies support, anti-captcha... The punchline is: all of this and much more you could find in jdownloader 10 years ago. But somehow youtube-dl won that race. How did that happen?

View on HN

Jdownloader has the aesthetic of sketchy windows freeware from a bygone era. I tried it once, then uninstalled it a minute later. youtube-dl also integrates well with other tools or autonomous workflows; for example mpv invokes it to stream media from the web without downloading it to the disk.

it is sketchy windows freeware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JDownloader, https://support.jdownloader.org/Knowledgebase/Article/View/a...

Huh, I thought it was properly FOSS albeit with a plea for subscriptions, but that's much worse. Evidently my gut instinct was right.

I think it is OSS [1], although all the code is in Subversion and I don't see a web interface. I haven't dug through it much, but poking around inside the "trunk" module, I see files with headers that say they're GPLv3.

EDIT: Here's a Git mirror of trunk [2]. See, e.g., this file [3].

[1]: https://svn.jdownloader.org/projects/jd [2]: https://github.com/mirror/jdownloader [3]: https://github.com/mirror/jdownloader/blob/master/src/jd/gui...

> I think it is OSS [1], although all the code is in Subversion

What has the license with the chosen version control system to do?

The emphasis was more on the "no web interface" part. In 2020, I feel like Subversion is significantly less common than git, so having to install SVN + possibly learn SVN commands is a moderate barrier to browsing the code.

By the way git is an excellent SVN command-line client, though it doesn't help with the learning curve.

I always run it under a separate user account because it looks so sketchy

I thought it was sketchy by association. It used to be always recommended by sketchy pirate sites to bypass the download limits on sketchy one-click-hosters

As a former jdownlader user, it never stopped working but seems to be neglected.

Not to mention the ability to pip install youtube-dl compared to getting jdownloder off of some software site with multiple dark patterns to dodge.

I still use jdownloader, it does it's job. It works on a wide range of sources, works on youtube very well. The install bit is true you literally need to google "jdowloader clean installers no adware" which is pretty bad

the trick is to download the "other OS" version, that one is just a jar based application and doesn't have all the adware

That's exactly what the weboob project aims to do: modularize backends (ie website) and applications so you can "use" website content the way you want

https://weboob.org/

This comment comes up every time weboob is mentioned, but it'd probably see much better adoption if it was named anything other than "we boob". It's a bit of an off-putting name.

An old post about the views of the author concerning the complainers: https://laurent.bachelier.name/2013/12/weboob-the-asshole-de...

A more constructive approach to doing what every complainer asked without atually doing anything about it: https://laurent.bachelier.name/2018/07/a-proposal-for-saniti...

> youtube-dl sort of situations and RIAA would have barely made a splash

First - that wouldn't be good, such situations should make big splashes. Second - removing a YouTube plug-in from YouTube-DL would make a significant splash anyway.

gallery-dl has almost all of these features, minus the GUI and desktop integration. Did you read the link?

Did you?

I did not find a single one.

I mean, proxy support is listed in the config docs[1]. Those docs also break down the functionality of gallery-do by module, leading me to believe you either didn’t read or didn’t understand the docs.

[1] https://github.com/mikf/gallery-dl/blob/master/docs/configur...

[1] describes a very basic proxy support indeed. However I can't imagine a use case for that. What is useful is a support for rotation of proxy list with every download request together with auto-updating such list.

As for modules - splitting each site's support by file is an absolute minimum for sanity. Keeping up all that support in one project quickly becomes quite a chore for a single project maintainer. The whole process fetching the while project and initiating a PR on a github is also rather awkward for developer too. Hence the existence of https://github.com/un-def/dl-plus project.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com