JDownloader

5.0 stars

"Most powerful downloader for Mac; not for Grandma"

June 5, 2012  |   By cnethen

Pros

Love this app but it's not for your grandmother! (tips/instructions in summary)

WHAT'S SO GREAT!?
Well, this can do YouTubes, DailyMotion, pr0n.... you can put in passwords and dump entire lists of hotfiles, fileserves, megas, rapidshare whatever into it and it will parse download them all for you. So yeah, janky interface, but soooooo powerful.

You just copy links to your clipboard and it will automagically queue them... then you tell JDownloader to download them all at once (unless you change the setting ;) ... it's just not really that straightforward if you like to be organized ;) See below.

Cons

Like I said, it's not something you'd just tell grams to download and install.

Just downloading this program is a little sketch because you come here to cnet and grandma will see that big link for "Clean your Mac" and download some malware instead of Jdownloader.

Love seeing all the different Youtube formats and qualities available but individually selecting and downloading them is non-intuitive and most people will end up downloading more versions than they really need/want.

You can configure the interface a little bit to add/remove buttons but yeah, this is the weakest part...

Summary

Here's how to use it!

0) Download
1) start the installer
2) if you've got LIttle Snitch just go ahead and allow any connection/server for forever...this thing has a lot of connections to make (it's aware of hundreds/thousands of sites with embedded movie/flash/media content)

During Installation
3) I would uncheck "make icon on desktop/dock" (just launch it from Spotlight as needed).
4) change the default save-folder to something like "-Jdownloads" -- this will kick it up to the top of your Downloads list (right-click in "choose a location" whitespace and choose "new folder" or click right icon/symbol which makes a new folder)
5) flashgot? I say "no" but you might like the integration...I haven't used it

USE!
a) any time you copy a link to your clipboard with video/media content, JDownloader will parse it in the background.... for the most part... it's got hundreds (thousands?) of sites ... if it doesn't auto-find content, you can paste your link into Jdownloader manually. The available media will show up in the Linkgrabber tab....

b) Now, it will split YouTubes into four different versions.... FLV, MP4, MP3, and WebM....and then each of these is as a different quality level! So you don't need all that. If I love a video and want it in all formats, I will expand the four sections and then command-click to select the ones I want to queue. So like I get the biggest FLV (flash format), webm (highquality web format?), mp3 (just the audio! perfect when you want to dump a youtube song into iTunes), and MP4 (highquality video).

c) Got those selected? Right-click and choose "Continue with selected" and it will just download what you highlighted.... you can configure the interface a little bit to add/remove buttons but yeah, this is the weakest part... I don't know if they've added a button to just download selected but that's what they should do ;)

Or even a shortcut to "download highest quality" which grabs the largest in each section....

EXTRA CREDIT
You can force/resume/reset stalled downloads...you can tell how many simultaneous connections to open....so on and so forth.

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