I used Aria2 in the past to download ISO's of Linux and FreeBSD. There is definitely an advantage to using multiple sources at once.<p>On an unrelated note, it would be cool if large HTTP downloads provided a header indicating a BitTorrent source as well. That way intelligent clients could switch to BitTorrent or use both in parallel.
If you download a lot of files from free file hosting sites like Rapidshare or MEGA, check out JDownloader (<a href="http://jdownloader.org/home/index?s=lng_en" rel="nofollow">http://jdownloader.org/home/index?s=lng_en</a>). Its interface is somewhat ugly, but it makes downloading many files from such sites way easier. It can monitor the clipboard for copied links, and it automatically pops up a window for you to enter a CAPTCHA when it’s necessary. I think for some sites it can even solve the CAPTCHA for you.
I've been using Aria2 for a while now. You can run it as a daemon:<p><pre><code> aria2c --enable-rpc=true --rpc-listen-all=true --daemon --dir=/mnt/downloads --continue=true --max-concurrent-downloads=1 --max-connection-per-server=16 --max-tries=0 --split=16 --stream-piece-selector=geom --enable-http-pipelining=true
</code></pre>
You can find documentation for the various options here: <a href="http://aria2.sourceforge.net/manual/en/html/aria2c.html" rel="nofollow">http://aria2.sourceforge.net/manual/en/html/aria2c.html</a><p><a href="https://github.com/ziahamza/webui-aria2" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ziahamza/webui-aria2</a> is a decent web client. I use this to post downloads to my server at home.
Wow, you can also specify the algorithm for choosing the piece to download when multi-segmented downloads is chosen.<p>--stream-piece-selector=inorder<p>Very useful to start watching a video file before its fully downloaded. It must be the most advanced downloader.<p><a href="http://aria2.sourceforge.net/manual/en/html/aria2c.html#cmdoption--stream-piece-selector" rel="nofollow">http://aria2.sourceforge.net/manual/en/html/aria2c.html#cmdo...</a><p>I hacked axel to do the same but my patch was not perfect. <a href="https://github.com/adrenalinup/axel-incremental-downloading" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/adrenalinup/axel-incremental-downloading</a><p>Didn't knew that aria2 provided this out-of-the-box.
Quick question that I couldn't figure out from reading documentation. Can this download a file from bittorrent and http simultaneously? A number of Linux ISOs are downloadable from http mirrors as well as a torrent.
I had to switch to aria2c for fetching larger from AWS S3 (50-150 MB). Otherwise a small peecent of downloads were slow (in EC2), b/c most other fetchers have really poor retry logic.