I used Aria2 in the past to download ISO's of Linux and FreeBSD. There is definitely an advantage to using multiple sources at once.

On an unrelated note, it would be cool if large HTTP downloads provided a header indicating a BitTorrent source as well. That way intelligent clients could switch to BitTorrent or use both in parallel.

There actually is such an header, based on the Metalink format, and aria2 supports it! Unfortunately, while many support Metalink files, almost no other download manager supports Metalink/HTTP headers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalink#Example_Metalink.2FHTT...

That's pretty cool. Might be an excuse for me to mess around with Firefox and see if they'll accept a patch from me over the upcoming holidays.

If you download a lot of files from free file hosting sites like Rapidshare or MEGA, check out JDownloader (http://jdownloader.org/home/index?s=lng_en). Its interface is somewhat ugly, but it makes downloading many files from such sites way easier. It can monitor the clipboard for copied links, and it automatically pops up a window for you to enter a CAPTCHA when it’s necessary. I think for some sites it can even solve the CAPTCHA for you.

Also they have great support for downloading Youtube videos.

I like youtube-dl better :)

http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

For stuff between and not including 480p and 1080p. Google changed something with how it streams 1080p and JDownloader no longer catches it.

They separated out the video streams and audio streams, so now the only 1080p link you can get is video only (and it uses a different ID to the old 1080p videos, so support needs to be explicitly added for calculating the link).

I ended up writing a wrapper around youtube-dl and ffmpeg to download the MPEG-DASH video and audio streams and mux it because of this. It was a spur-of-the-moment hack, so don't expect error handling.

https://github.com/rahulg/dotfiles/blob/master/tools/dashtub...

Aria with apt-fast .. its heaven for package management in ubuntu

Have a blog post?

The ability to do downloads from multiple sources (mirrors) and torrent are the killer features for me. Will use it more often, instead of wget. :)

I use aria2 as the backend for Arch Linux's pacman for package management.

aria2 integration makes one of the fastest package management tools out there... faster.

I've been using Aria2 for a while now. You can run it as a daemon:

  aria2c --enable-rpc=true --rpc-listen-all=true --daemon --dir=/mnt/downloads --continue=true --max-concurrent-downloads=1 --max-connection-per-server=16 --max-tries=0 --split=16 --stream-piece-selector=geom --enable-http-pipelining=true

You can find documentation for the various options here: http://aria2.sourceforge.net/manual/en/html/aria2c.html

https://github.com/ziahamza/webui-aria2 is a decent web client. I use this to post downloads to my server at home.

Wow, you can also specify the algorithm for choosing the piece to download when multi-segmented downloads is chosen.

--stream-piece-selector=inorder

Very useful to start watching a video file before its fully downloaded. It must be the most advanced downloader.

http://aria2.sourceforge.net/manual/en/html/aria2c.html#cmdo...

I hacked axel to do the same but my patch was not perfect. https://github.com/adrenalinup/axel-incremental-downloading

Didn't knew that aria2 provided this out-of-the-box.

Quick question that I couldn't figure out from reading documentation. Can this download a file from bittorrent and http simultaneously? A number of Linux ISOs are downloadable from http mirrors as well as a torrent.

If a torrent uses web seeds, aria2 can use them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent#Web_seeding

Yup. Just include the torrent file and then one or more HTTP URLs. It will use the torrent metadata to validate HTTP chunks too.

But can we please have multi-segmented downloads without having to use 2nd party wrapper?

    aria2c -x5 

Easy.

What do you mean by multi-segmented downloads? I thought it already did so.

I had to switch to aria2c for fetching larger from AWS S3 (50-150 MB). Otherwise a small peecent of downloads were slow (in EC2), b/c most other fetchers have really poor retry logic.

There's an Android binary, but is there a GUI for Android?

if you use firefox it can become your default download manager with FlashGot. I remember having problems in Mac, but it works like a charm in linux