Y’all still using this? Is it safe?
Yes but the caveat is you have to use the “clean” one. The publicly facing JD2 downloader comes with malware. There is a clean link that can be found on their forum. Once you have that though, the thing just updates itself a couple times a day, it’s not an ongoing issue once you have the damn thing.
Then it has ads that you can disable, but they re-enable after so many days. It’s just an annoyance though, like how we’re in the year of our LORD 2026 and it still has no dark mode. There IS a hack to get it dark, but again, like the ads, it doesn’t persist for long and it’s generally not worth doing. I’ve done it a few times, and it’s nice, but it goes away before you know it and then it’s like “fuck it”.
I think the thing you want to be careful with is, by default it scans your clipboard. Granted it does this for download links, but it catches all kinds of bizarre shit. So I just leave it off. When I want to download something I copied, I just find it on the dock, ⌘+L to open the link thing, ⌘+V to paste it, enter, then I’m good to go.
Speaking of the dock, it keeps moving itself to the end. I think what is happening is, after an update, it adds itself to the end of the dock if you’ve moved it to the middle or the left.
The dock is Mac specific, I’m not sure if it acts differently on a Windows taskbar or whatever you have on Linux (it’s Linux, so it could be either). Of course, so are the command shortcuts, but if you’re using Jd2, subscribed to c/piracy on Lemmy (especially if you’re a db0 user… you can figure them out for your OS. ;)
JD2 also auto extracts archives by default which is certainly not my preference. Annoying old program but it can do so much.
Funny you should mention that… 7-zip is not available on macOS as a GUI (probably due to limitations on file managers maybe, since it can be used as one), and the command line never works for me with password protected archives. However, with Jd2 it works, as long as I supply the password before the archive downloads.
I do have an unpacker, but it doesn’t work on everything (like password protected .7z files).
I could probably get a more robust file manager (something like Directory Opus for Windows, but I’m sure other options do exist on Macs) that has a built-in archiver that would do what Jd2 does, but for now Jd2 solves the minor issue.
Pretty sure you can disable archive extraction in settings if you don’t want it to do that.
That’s a wild workaround! You can disable yeah it’s just a strange default setting.
I haven’t seen any reason to believe it’s unsafe.
Like, the source code?
I’ve been using Stacher7. Occasionally YT gets the upper hand, but they quickly release a fix. Cat and mouse.
that seems to be youtube specific, unless im missing something.
It does other sites too, but YouTube is always the tricky one.
Jdownloader does hundreds of sites and not just videos
I like this! I’m more looking for one just for file links over https tho
I’ve been using it for nearly a decade. Occasionally I need to wait for it to update when youtube futzes with something but it otherwise solid.
Why not just use cURL?
Why not use openssl s_client?
Why not use netcat?
Maybe they don’t know about cURL, and that’s why they don’t use it.
A better thing to write would be: try cURL. It is this and that, bla bla bla.







