Newer Update:
Downloading from file sharing sites can be done from the command line using a nifty program called plowshare.
Download it from here.
Now install it:
wget https://plowshare.googlecode.com/files/plowshare4_1~git20140112.7ad41c8-1_all.deb dpkg -i plowshare4_1~git20140112.7ad41c8-1_all.deb apt-get install -f
Older post:
Working on the XDA server, I needed to import Rom firmware to work on them. Having an extremely slow connection speed, I cursed the few XDA users who uploaded the firmware to file sharing sites like Hotfile, no doubt to encash on the revenue offered by these sites. I cant blame them, been there, done that. 😉
Anyway, I made a serrendipitious discovery of a program which runs on the bash command line, and downloads from file sharing sites, circumventing or working along their javascript based countdown tickers (which make piecemeal of web based browsers like links and elinks), and their captchas. In case of Recaptchas, the program downloads the captcha image and asks for user input to decipher the text in it.
It’s called plowdown and like all other awesome things, it’s an open source project, currently hosted on Google Project pages. Download it here.
I tried it while working on the xda system, and it worked wonders. It downloaded a 1GB Note 2 firmware in maximum speed, without any issues whatsoever. Problem solved. I could now work on the file remotely without having to download it to my PC first. And along with other tricks I’ve already mentioned, I could even remote copy it to Goo servers and share it. I also remote ftpd the file to my own host.
Here’s the program working along.
To install the program:
Download the latest source tarball from the Google Code repo
Extract it
tar -xvvf plowshare4-snapshot-git20121104.411fdec.tar.gz
Now install it to a local directory
make install PREFIX=/home/droidzone/myapps
Using the program:
In case of Samsung leaked Roms, most of the files seem to be hosted on Hotfile. Plowdown works very well on Hotfile. You can use the following command to download a typical file:
wget `plowdown http://www.hotfile.com/dl/187869240/8e5ac43/N7100XXDLL7_N7100ODDDLL2_INU.zip.html`
This leads to:
[[email protected]] ~ $wget `plowdown http://www.hotfile.com/dl/187869240/8e5ac43/N7100XXDLL7_N7100ODDDLL2_INU.zip.html` Starting download (hotfile): http://www.hotfile.com/dl/187869240/8e5ac43/N7100XXDLL7_N7100ODDDLL2_INU.zip.html Waiting 30 seconds... done No ascii viewer found to display captcha image Local image: /tmp/plowdown.22419.27107.recaptcha.jpg Leave this field blank and hit enter to get another captcha image Enter captcha response (drop punctuation marks, case insensitive): TRADES edlePer File URL: http://s177.hotfile.com/get/868a280af7edca209458390c8bc18da53af1ebb5/50ecebe8/320/c78ada7ded148d27/b32a838/N7100XXDLL7_N7100ODDDLL2_INU.zip Filename: N7100XXDLL7_N7100ODDDLL2_INU.zip
Note the prompt for the captcha image. The image saved remotely can be scp-d to a local folder, viewed locally, and the captcha typed back in at the prompt. It’s all very easy!