This release is not part of the 3.0 major release.
No major new features have been introduced, the focus is primarily on refining existing functionality and fixing bugs.
(except for operations such as registering file associations and system services during installation.)
The Linux version is free now, while the Windows version and the upcoming macOS version are not free. However, the trial expiration reminder interval has been increased from 5 minutes to 1 hour. The reminder will also no longer appear while the application is minimized or in the system tray.
Due to compatibility and fallback issues, musl has been replaced with glibc, with a minimum required version of 2.38 (run ldd --version to check your system's libc version).
The Linux version no longer bundles the libc or Qt5 shared libraries.
Fixed all bugs reported by users over the past several years, as well as those encountered by the developer during personal use.
(This does not guarantee that no bugs have been missed or that new features have not introduced new bugs. Further testing in a wider range of real-world scenarios is still needed.)
The download engine has been significantly optimized, with multiple fallback strategies added. The primary goal is to ensure that the correct file is downloaded successfully. The low-speed issue caused by TCP starvation in certain scenarios has also been addressed.
(However, the issue has not been completely resolved. It is impossible to make the perfect trade-off for every scenario. The 3.0 release is expected to introduce a setting that leaves this decision to the user.)
Similar to Site Rules, but this feature allows a single task to download from multiple URLs in parallel. It is a general-purpose feature that users must configure manually. The application will not include predefined rules for popular but unstable services such as Hugging Face and GitHub, as doing so would conflict with the developer's design philosophy.
In previous versions, the connection lists only displayed the status, number of connections, chunks, and addresses, making their purpose somewhat unclear.
The current version displays each connection's progress, speed, latency, and the proxy it is using.
Proxy functionality has been significantly enhanced, with further major improvements planned.
(As the current online ecosystem continues to deteriorate, traditional download manager kind software finds itself on the verge of death, potentially becoming completely unusable at any time due to factors such as Cloudflare. proxy software with dynamically updatable rules and SSL can be used to forward traffic and bypass WAF verification as an interim solution.)
Since native remote functionality already exists, there are no longer plans to develop a WebUI. Instead, the functionality has been upgraded to an HTTP file server.
In daily work, the developer frequently encounters situations requiring file transfers across networks, as well as cases where other software needs an HTTP URL for subscriptions or similar purposes. Switching between local and remote servers, or installing and configuring another local HTTP server application, is cumbersome, unstable, and wastes considerable time.
Now, users only need to enable this feature in the settings and place files in the designated folder.
The HTTP server delivers adequate performance, approaching that of Nginx, and is fully capable of serving as a public-facing server. However, the maximum thread pool size is currently limited to 8.
If you need the output in MKV format, right-click the task and select [Actions] -> [TS Transcoding / Repair] to convert it.
The application does not convert files to MKV by default because most media players can play TS files directly, and merging is extremely fast, limited primarily by disk speed and typically reaching gigabytes per second. By comparison, MKV conversion runs at approximately less than 100 MB/s because it performs numerous media file checks and repairs, including timeline corrections.
(One side effect is a considerable increase in binary size. If no users need this feature, it may be removed in the future.)
The application now supports both automatic and manual merging.
This is a built-in feature that increases the binary size by approximately 2-3 MB. This feature is built in and adds only about 2-3 MB to the binary. Users don't need to install FFmpeg, which is over 100 MB, and the feature doesn't rely on external process calls.
(Its fault tolerance is still inferior to that of FFtools, which has undergone decades of optimization, but it is more than adequate for downloading and merging media files.)
When downloading stream media, the application displays a confirmation dialog containing the file list, including video, audio, and subtitles. Multiple files can be downloaded together as a folder.
If video/audio merging is enabled (the default), and there is only one video file and one audio file, they will ultimately be merged into a single file, and the other files will be deleted.
If you upgraded from an earlier version, go to Settings -> Stream -> Without Confirm and uncheck the option to enable the confirmation dialog.
The JavaScript MPD implementation is a cut-down port of the C++ version. Furthermore, since almost all MPD encryption schemes involve DRM, MPD files containing encryption configurations will be rejected for download by default. To proceed, you must manually edit the MPD file, remove the relevant sections, and then drag the file into the application.
When a live stream ends, a fatal error occurs, or the task is paused, the task is considered complete and the downloaded files are merged.
(Live streams using variant M3U8 protocols, such as Stripchat, are still unsupported. Currently, attempting to download them only retrieves a branded intro.)
(In practice, the actual improvements to detection capabilities are limited. Most of the work involved fixing bugs that prevented previously implemented functionality from working correctly.)
Examples include a segment detection success rate exceeding 90%; an option to skip a specified number of seconds at the beginning of videos during batch video preview; filtering functionality in the Collector; and automatic extraction of regular images from SVG image packs in the Resource Manager.
(A side effect is that you will see many blank images.)
Users can now add third-party download managers or backend receivers other than FileCXX.
The built-in FileCXX default downloader cannot be deleted or edited in the list.
Some new features are not fully polished. For example, tools such as merging and remuxing cannot be canceled midway through execution and do not display progress or status information.
This is intentional. The 3.0 major release will substantially upgrade the application's UI architecture based on another project, while retaining CPU rendering, low memory usage, and broad compatibility.
The developer does not want to duplicate work that will soon be replaced.