Metalink support

[SamiSerola]

I wish you still try to find a solution to get Metalink supported.

I have read through the TODO.md and understand the limitations. However, on behalf of many other users. I hope you keep on trying.

Currently I use and recommend my contacts to use older versions of SeaMonkey and DownThemAll as a workaround. We use Metalink at ipernity service because it is supposedly the best solution to give DownThemAll an access to otherwise restricted files (full size images).

[nmaier]

We could probably do some basic metalink support, that is sniff metalinks and offer selection and downloads. However, the more advanced stuff, like mirrors and checksums, is out of scope because of the lack of WebExtension support to implement these.

[SamiSerola]

Curious to find out how it works and give feedback on it. Thank you for considering to implement that option.

[SamiSerola]

Please... =)

Still hoping that some Metalink feature would become implemented some day. Although I seem to be only one wishing this, I do know there are several others out there who would like to have Metalink supported again.

[aidanharris]

I know metalink usage is pretty niche but it would be nice to see this at least for importing URL lists (ignoring all of the other complexities like different mirrors and checksums, etc). DownThemAll doesn't parse the XML properly at the moment.

Metalink is useful for downloading entire directories from HTTP shares (without having to do regex parsing of anchors/hrefs and do this recursively for every directory). If DownThemAll could honour the directory structure e.g <file name="a/b/c/foo.iso"> would create the directory tree a/b/c in the download subfolder before saving foo.iso in it then even better.

I came looking for a good download manager that can support this properly and that has a good user-interface but surprisingly there is not much. KGet supports this but it's slow/buggy and doesn't have a good user-interface.

The only thing that handles it decently is Wget:

wget -N https://example.org/index.metalink && wget --trust-server-names --input-metalink index.metalink 

But sometimes files will fail to download and I'd like to see that properly which is impossible in the sea of Wget output and possibly manually retry them. A good user-interface here would help a lot.

[as-muncher]

I'm on openSUSE's website trying to download openSUSE Tumbleweed, and it gives me a metalink. After doing some searching, I see that it can be opened using Downthemall, except I don't really see a way to open a file directly using Downthemall. And when I click on the link to download it, Firefox offers for me to save the .meta4 file instead of Downthemall offering to download it. So now it seems I have to use FreeDownloadHelper to download it instead.