FlareGet User Manual 2012-2014 FlareGet.com http://www.flareget.com
Introduction What is FlareGet? FlareGet is a lightweight, powerful, full featured, multi-threaded, multi-segment download manager and accelerator for Linux and Windows. It is designed for downloading files from any remote server via HTTP, HTTPS and FTP. It also supports meta-links. Some of the key features of FlareGet are: Dynamic File Segmentation: It uses a robust dynamic file segmentation algorithm to speed up the download. The download is split into segments to increase the speed. In addition to dynamic file segmentation, it uses Http-Pipelining which further accelerates each segment up to six times. Auto segments further ensure acceleration until the end. Enhanced Browser Integration: It integrates with all the browsers to replace their default download manager and start the download by itself. It supports almost all the browsers firefox, google chrome, chromium, opera etc. Resume support: It can resume unfinished downloads even on power failures or system crash. It also automatically retries when a segment or download fails. Currently there is no resume support for FTP downloads Auto Refreshing of Downloads: It automatically refreshes download URL and cookies in case URL expires. Youtube Grabber: One click flash video download from Youtube.com is supported for all the browsers. Smart Scheduler: You can easily schedule FlareGet to download files automatically. It allows you to start and pause downloading files at the set time. Batch Downloads: You can simply import URLs from a text file (each link in separate line) or an HTML file and download them all. Speed Limits: You can limit the download speed to prevent usage of whole bandwidth. Minimum Requirements: In order to use FlareGet you must have one of the following systems: Linux / Microsoft Windows XP / Vista / 7. In Linux following minimum dependencies should be met: Qt libraries with version >=4.8.1 glibc (C library) with version >=2.13 Support: For support and queries please visit: http://flareget.com Email: support@flareget.com
1 FlareGet Dialogs 1.1 New Download Dialog The New Download Dialog looks like this: and when expanded: Following is the description of various fields: Referrer: The website from which the download started (required for auto refreshing of URL) Cookie string: It contains the cookie required for verification Cookie file: It contains the path of file containing the cookie Post data: It contains the data needed to be sent to the server (rarely used) Checksum: You can pass on the checksum of file to be downloaded, to verify the integrity of the file after the download User Agent: Name of the client to send with the request Max download speed: To control the download speed Note: In most of the cases, all these fields are optional and automatically filled by the Browser Integration Plugin or Flashgot. Browser Integration Plugin cannot however pass on the post data. In case your bandwidth is less than 1mbps, using 4 segments is more than enough.
1.2 Batch Download Dialog The Batch Download Dialog looks like this: This dialog pops up on importing URLs from any text file, html file or http link of a web page. You can use up, down and delete buttons to change the order of the downloads. Filters make it easy to automatically choose files on the basis of file types. You can select/unselect by toggling the green tick button in the first column of every row. Number of simultaneous downloads and segments per download will be decided by settings in Settings Downloads Batch Downloads. 1.3 Refresh Download Dialog The Refresh Download Dialog looks like this: Refresh Download Dialog is displayed when a paused download fails to resume due to expired URL or cookies. Following is the description of various buttons: Open: This buttons opens the Referrer URL in your default browser, from where you need to start the download again.
Resume: When the download is started again and transferred to FlareGet, instead of starting the download from beginning, the URL and cookies of the current download will be updated, and you can resume the download from where you had left. Try again later: It will pause the download again. Cancel: It would cancel the download and temporary files would be purged. 1.4 Settings Dialog You can manage all the settings in FlareGet through Settings Dialog. Following is the description of different pages of Settings Dialog: 1.4.1 General The General setting page looks like this: You can manage all the general settings related to displaying of various types of confirmation and notification dialogs.
1.4.2 Connections The Connections setting page looks like this: Following is the description of some of the options: Maximum number of segments per download: This determines the default number of segments to be used for each download. The value here determines the default value in Start Download Dialog. Maximum concurrent downloads: This determines the number of maximum simultaneous downloads, all other downloads are automatically queued when total active downloads are equal to this value. The auto queued downloads are resumed automatically, without user intervention. Max download speed: It determines the max speed of each download. A value of 0 means no limit. Please note that speed limit is applied per download. This setting can be manually overridden by choosing a different speed limit in context menu of any download. Enable Http-Pipelining: It can improve the download speed considerably, in some cases, under low traffic conditions. It is better to disable it, if you are connected to a Wireless network.
1.4.3 Downloads The Downloads setting page looks like this: Following is the description of some of the options: Maximum number of segments per download: This determines the default number of segments to be used per download in Batch Downloading. Maximum concurrent downloads: This determines the number of maximum simultaneous downloads during Batch Downloading. UserAgent: It determines the name of the client to send with the request. It will be used only when no User-agent is supplied in the Start Download Dialog.
1.4.4 Appearance The Appearance setting page looks like this: Following is the description of some of the options: Display progress bar without color gradient: If this is checked, a 2D style progress bar will be displayed. Change style: This determines the current style of GUI. It is recommended to use GTK+ style in all the shells. If you shell is KDE, then Oxygen style is recommended. Change language: You can choose between more than 13 different languages. A restart is required to apply this change.
1.4.5 Network Proxy The Network Proxy setting page looks like this: You can choose between various proxy settings as per your need. Please note FlareGet currently does not support FTP downloads behind HTTP proxy.
1.4.6 Scheduler The Scheduler setting page 1 looks like this: Following is the description of some of the options: Start scheduled downloads at: If it is checked, it would start the scheduler, if the date and time refer to a future date and time. All the downloads in the selected queue on page 2 will be scheduled for download. Stop all downloads at: If it is checked, all the running downloads would be paused at the scheduled time, if time refers to a future time. Exit download manager: If it is checked, the download manager will exit, after all the tasks are completed by scheduler. Turn off computer: If it is checked, the computer will be automatically turned off, when scheduler completes all the tasks. Please note that this feature may not be supported by all Linux Distributions. It is tested only for Ubuntu and Fedora.
The Scheduler setting page 2 looks like this: It determines the list of the downloads to be scheduled for downloading at a later time. Finished and running downloads are not displayed here. The current queue will be scheduled for download when scheduler starts. For more details on how to use scheduler refer to Scheduler topic under How to use FlareGet section.
1.4.7 Browser Integration The Browser Integration setting page looks like this: Please make sure Browser Integration Plugin is already installed. You can also use Flashgot addon available for Firefox. Following is the description of some of the options: Monitor clipboard: If it is checked, recently copied valid URL would automatically get copied to URL field of Start Download Dialog, when invoked. Use enhanced browser integration: If it is checked, it starts flaremonitor, which helps the Browser Integration Plugin, to grab even those downloads, which normally many download managers fail to grab. Please note that due to many restrictions in Linux Distributions, flaremonitor won't stop just by unchecking the Use enhanced browser integration option. You need to manually stop it by typing following command in terminal as root: killall flaremonitor
1.4.8 Sites Manager The Sites Manager setting page looks like this: It stores user-names, passwords and optionally cookies of websites which require authentication during download. It is only required when you only have the link and no cookies. In case download is passed on to FlareGet with cookies, then no password is required. All the passwords are stored in encrypted form. Direct download from file sharing sites with premium accounts: Many file sharing sites like upload.net, rapidshare.com etc. offer direct download feature. It requires cookies to be stored in flareget for authentication. So, just paste the download url in browser, when the download is passed to flareget though plugin or flashgot, flareget will automatically save the cookies, if the site has been added to sites manager. After this, you can directly add the url to flareget or use flareget batch downloader to import the list of urls and the saved cookies will be used for authentication. Cookies get expired after a specific time period, so repeating the above procedure is required if download fails due to expired cookies. Please note: This method will work for any site which requires cookies.
1.4.9 Flash Videos The Flash Videos setting page looks like this: You can configure the working of Grabber in this dialog. Following is the description of some of the options: Network Interface: It refers to network interface on which Grabber will listen for network traffic. If it is set to Default, it automatically determines the active network interface. In case you are connected to more than one networks, you can choose other network interfaces for Grabber to listen to. By pass root authentication permanently: Grabber is actually a libpcap based network sniffer and all libpcap based applications require root permission. Since, it is dangerous to give root permissions to any program, FlareGet uses Linux Capabilities feature which allows only those permissions to be granted to a program permanently, which a program needs, in this case listening to network traffic.
1.4.10 Categories The Categories setting page looks like this: Following is the description of some of the options: Default download directory: It is the default base directory where downloads are stored. If categorization feature is set, then all sub directories for different types of files are created in the base directory only. Category: Here you can add more file extensions to allow for better categorization of downloads. Note: If at the time of download a different directory other than Default Download Directory is chosen, then even if categorization option is set, no sub directory for the new download will be created, as per its file type. 1.5 Authentication Dialog The Authentication Dialog looks like this: This dialog is invoked when a website requires authentication, for a download to succeed. If the username and password are already stored in Sites Manager, in that case authentication dialog won't be invoked unless authentication fails.
2 How To Use FlareGet 2.1 New Download To start downloading from FlareGet, all you need is a download URL of the file. Just click Add Url in the tool bar, and copy the URL in the Start Download Dialog. You can start the download by clicking the Start button or queue it by clicking the Queue button to download it later. 2.2 Resume Download To resume paused downloads, just click Resume in the toolbar or in the context menu, and download will resume from where you had left it. In case you resumed the download after a long time, which caused the URL or cookies to expire, the Refresh Download Dialog will pop up. In Refresh Download Dialog click the Open button which opens the Referrer URL in your default browser, it is from where you need to start the download again. When the download is started again and transferred to FlareGet through Browser Integration Plugin or Flashgot addon, instead of starting the download from beginning, the URL and cookies of the current download will be updated in the Refresh Download Dialog, and you can resume the download from where you had left. You can also manually update the URL and cookies by copying them in the Refresh Download Dialog. In most cases just refreshing the URL is enough and refreshing of cookies is optional. An alternate way of refreshing the URL is by right clicking the download and selecting Download Information. Here you can paste the new URL and resume the download afterwards. Note: In case you wish to resume from a different download server, the Start Download Dialog may also pop up, when Refresh Download Dialog gets updated. So, both Start Download Dialog and Refresh Download Dialog will contain the updated URL and cookies. In this case you can simply neglect the Start Download Dialog by canceling it and clicking Resume button in Refresh Download Dialog to resume the download. 2.3 Browser Integration FlareGet is the only download manager for Linux which integrates with all the browsers to replace their default download manager and start the download by itself. There are two ways of integrating FlareGet with the browsers: Browser Integration Plugin: It provides browser integration with all the browsers Firefox, Chrome, Opera etc. Further, to enhance the integration, extensions for firefox and chrome can be installed from the Chrome Web Store and Firefox Addons Store. Opera (version < 13) users need flaremonitor. FlashGot Addon: It provides full browser integration with Firefox. You just need to install FlashGot addon and select FlareGet from the available list of download managers. Issues with Browser Integration Plugin: It is technically impossible to pass all the downloads to a download manager, and even if it is passed, the download may not succeed. Firefox provides a very rich API for creating addons, hence FlashGot provides full browser integration. But this is not true for other browsers like Chrome or Opera, where Browser Integration Plugin is the only choice. Following are the cases, where it is technically impossible to grab or successfully download the file after grabbing the URL: In Opera (version < 13) if the URL starts with "https" and HTTP response header contains "Content-Disposition" header. Firefox and chrome don't have this issue, as extensions modify the header. Flaremonitor doesn't work in case of https, so Opera has this issue. If any website uses https and HttpOnly flag is included in the HTTP response header, the cookie cannot be accessed from client side. Only Firefox allows cookies to be accessed in this case and that also through a complex method. If cookies are important for download to succeed, then download is bound to fail. An example of such a site is Dropbox.com. You can press hold F key to prevent FlareGet from taking over the download, provided extensions are installed and flaremonitor is uninstalled.
2.4 Grabber Flash Video Download Grabber is a libpcap based HTTP sniffer which keeps on listening to network traffic and intelligently filters out download URLs of multimedia files like flv, mp4, webm and ogg, which flash player can play. The moment video starts in the flash player on any video website like Youtube.com, Dailymotion.com, Metacafe.com and all others, the video URL for that video is filtered out and a black panel is displayed over the screen, offering you to download the file. In case of Youtube.com wherein user can select different video qualities, if you wish to download a video of different video quality, just change the video quality in flash player, the moment video starts playing, the new URL is added to the list. Now, simply right click the black panel and you will see the link of other video quality file too. It should look somewhat similar to this: Note: All libpcap based applications require root permission. Since, it is dangerous to give root permissions to any program, FlareGet uses Linux Capabilities feature which allows only those permissions to be granted to a program permanently, which a program needs, in this case listening to network traffic. 2.5 Speed Limits FlareGet allows throttling of downloads, to prevent consumption of whole bandwidth during the download. You can apply speed limit in following ways: Global Speed Limit: It affects all the downloads, and download speed of each download won't exceed the value specified in global speed limit settings. To apply global speed limit go to Settings Connections Speed Limit and set a maximum value. Individual Speed Limit: It affects the individual download only, and overrides the global speed limit if set. To apply individual speed limit, just right click the selected download, and choose a speed limit from the context menu. Note: Some servers don't allow very small speeds and download may fail too. So using a very small speed is not recommended unless you are sure that the server from where you are downloading does not show the above described behavior.
2.6 Scheduler You can easily schedule FlareGet to download files automatically. It allows you to start and pause downloading files at the set time. A description of Scheduler dialog has already been discussed under FlareGet Dialogs chapter. Only working will be described here: Select the Queue page in Scheduler. It offers two queues Default and Custom Default queue contains all the downloads in the main queue of FlareGet. Completed and running downloads are not shown. If you wish to schedule all the downloads in main queue the way they are, just select the Schedule page and start the scheduler by setting the future time and date. Custom queue allows you to create a customized queue, in which you can reorder the downloads and delete the downloads from the queue which you don't wish to schedule for download. Once you have made changes to the Custom queue, just select the Schedule page and start the scheduler by setting the future time and date. Scheduler can also be used to pause all the downloads at the specified time. Just check the Stop all downloads at option and specify a future time. Turn off computer: If it is checked, the computer will be automatically turned off, when scheduler completes all the tasks. Please note that this feature may not be supported by all Linux Distributions. It is tested only for Ubuntu and Fedora.
2.7 Batch Downloads FlareGet allows you to import a list of download URLs and downloads them without the need of adding each download individually. You can import URL list in three ways: Text file: To import URLs from a text file go to File Import From text file. Each link should be in a separate line. All invalid links are automatically discarded. HTML file: To import URLs from a text file go to File Import From html file. It should be a valid HTML file. All invalid links are automatically discarded. HTTP Link: To import URLs from an on-line web-page go to File Import From http link. It should be a valid HTTP link, referring to a web-page containing the links of files you wish to download. All invalid links are automatically discarded. Once the links are parsed by FlareGet's parser, the Batch Download Dialog would appear, wherein you can use up, down and delete buttons to change the order of the downloads. Filters make it easy to automatically choose files on the basis of file types. You can select/unselect by toggling the green tick button in the first column of every row. Number of simultaneous downloads and segments per download will be decided by settings in Settings Downloads Batch Downloads.
FAQS How many segments should I use to achieve maximum download speed? It depends on your bandwidth. Increasing the number of segments increases as well as decreases the speed. When we increase number of segments, speed increases, but contention among segments also increases, which causes time outs and many other errors. So, we need to choose the number of segments as per our bandwidth. If your bandwidth is less than 1 Mbits/s then 4 segments are enough for maximum acceleration. All downloads in main queue disappear after restarting FlareGet. FlareGet only stores Paused, Queued, Failed and Canceled downloads in the All Downloads list. All finished downloads are move to Finished list. Installation fails with error "Dependency is not satisfiable: libc6 (>= 2.13) or libqt4-network (>= 4:4.8.1)". libc6 (>=2.13) and libqt4-network (>= 4:4.8.1) are minimum library requirements of FlareGet and FlareGet can't run if theses requirements are not met. Download starts at higher speed but after some time it gets very slow. You need to decrease the total number of segments you use. If you are connected to a wireless network, disabling Http-pipelining in the settings might help. Browser Integration is not working even after installing browser extensions. Browser extensions don't provide browser integration, instead they help Browser Integration Plugin to provide close to perfect browser integration. If browser integration is not working, it means plugin is missing. It happens when flareget is installed from Ubuntu Software Center. Download and install flareget from it's official website. Grabber dose not work when I connect to a VPN service or USB based internet connection. Grabber is actually a HTTP sniffer which works at layer 3 of TCP/IP stack to provide browser independence. When you use VPN all the packets you sent or receive are encrypted and decrypted at layer 4 of TCP/IP stack. Hence Grabber fails to filter out the URLs as they are encrypted. There is no solution to this even on Windows. You need to use some layer 4 application in that case e.g. any Firefox addon. How to prevent FlareGet from taking over the download from browser? Just press hold F key to disable browser integration momentarily (in firefox and chrome). Make sure flaremonitor is uninstalled for this to work.
About This documentation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. In case you wish to improve upon or contribute to this documentation you can request an editable copy of this documentation from the author at following email address: Email: support@flareget.com