Last Updated on September 26, 2020
In Operation
The main functionality offered by DZA! can be summarized by describing its 4 main functions:
- Web pages. There’s lots of good web page content crawlers available for Linux, but DZA!’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. The image to the right shows files downloaded from a web page.
- 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, Dailymotion, Vimeo, and other video sites. DZA! uses youtube-dl 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, a a feature complete C++ bittorrent implementation focusing on efficiency and scalability .
DZA!’s interface is well thought out, clean, and generally intuitive.
There’s two attractive toolbars which let you access the program’s 4 main functions and lots more besides.
There’s a good range 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.
There’s aspects that need to be fleshed out. For example, internationalization is very incomplete, with only complete translations available for English and French.
Here’s the dialog showing the Streaming dialog box. Enter an address of the stream (or a list of streams). The program interrogates the address, and after clicking ‘Continue’ offers a simple and advanced mode.
The image shows the Advanced options, letting you fine-tune which video and audio stream to download. There’s dropdown boxes which let you choose the video and audio stream.
Memory usage is light.
When downloading a video, DZA! uses around 104MB of RAM. Factor in that it also uses youtube-dl which adds another 100MB or so.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary