Apologies for what is essentially a longwinded tech advice thread. I wasn't sure where else to put it and I feel I can't sit on this information with websites ramping up their efforts to stop you from downloading their FREE content
I don't know about anyone else, but I am constantly plagued by shitty connections, download speeds, and overall experiences on pretty much every video/streaming website. It's mostly contained to youtube but that's mostly because I very rarely visit video sites for this reason and use yt-dl for the heavy lifting while I am asleep or something. Even then, I simply could not get a decent connection to youtube through youtube-dl.
Well I've come to find out that perhaps the youtube-dl "throttling" issue may largely be the result of downloaders like aria cucking their users. As I was attempting to fix a speed issue with yt-dl for about the 100th time, I happened upon a small footnote in the manpage of aria that I had overlooked many times before.
>https://aria2.github.io/manual/en/html/aria2c.html
>-s, --split=<N>
>[...]
>Note
>Some Metalinks regulate the number of servers to connect. aria2 strictly respects them. This means that if Metalink defines the maxconnections attribute lower than N, then aria2 uses the value of this lower value instead of N.
Essentially, aria is saying "if the website says you can't download in parallel, we won't let you. Fuck off".
I have since switched to axel and the difference is stunning. I've gone from MAYBE 50kb/s average 200kb/s max to 500kb/s average and around 2mb/s max. My internet is shit and suffice to say my average download speed is around 1-2mb/s on a good day. So while this isn't really close to where it could be it's miles ahead of where it was. As a comparison, I've never had an issue with downloaders built into/for web browsers.
Anyone else having decent download speeds without aria? How about with? I'd be interested to know if it's specific people and setups they are targeting or if this is a blanket way of trying to stop users from using download accelerators.