In Operation
On the first startup, the software invites you to take a brief tutorial to help you use the software.
ArrowDL is a standalone application, embedding its own web engine rather than using a third-party web browser technology. Here’s an image of ArrowDL in action.
ArrowDL’s main features are best summarized by describing its main functions:
- Web pages. There are many competent web page content crawlers available for Linux, but ArrowDL’s implementation is good. For example, there’s a smart editor to modify the URL for a list of downloads. There’s also the ability to rename a list of downloads with a range of options. There are filters for audio, images, archives, documents, applications etc, together with fast filtering.
- Single files / batch of files. It’s a sort of RegExp downloader with the ability to use batch descriptors to download multiple files.
- Video and audio streams. You can download streams from YouTube and other video sites. ArrowDL uses yt-dlp for this functionality. You can enter the address of the stream or a list of streams to download. A stream currently stored in the clipboard will automatically populate the field.
- Magnet Link and Torrents – a magnet link is a standard for identifying files (URN) by their content, via cryptographic hash value rather than by their location. For torrents the program uses libtorrent-rasterbar, a a feature complete C++ bittorrent implementation focusing on efficiency and scalability .
ArrowDLs interface is well thought out, clean, and generally intuitive.
There are plenty of configuration options including important options such as specifying the number of concurrent downloads, privacy options, together with advanced tweaking which lets you minimize memory usage for torrents.
Memory usage is light. When downloading a video, ArrowDL uses around 70MB of RAM. Factor in that it also needs youtube-dl which adds another 100MB or so.
Summary
We think ArrowDL is a great download manager with useful functionality, a well-designed interface, and first-rate performance. Give it a whirl!
Website: www.arrow-dl.com
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: ArrowDL
License: GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0
ArrowDL is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary