Congratulations, you just upgraded to Video DownloadHelper 7.3.0 for Firefox

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Video DownloadHelper 7 for Chrome

Video DownloadHelper 7.3.0 brings a number of improvements and fixes that have been requested or reported by our users.

Some of those fixes are located in the add-on itself, some had to be made in the companion application (the external application that is to be installed along with the extension in order to provide the necessary capabilities removed from Firefox Quantum v57). As a consequence, Video DownloadHelper 7.3.0 will request you to update the companion app to version 1.2.1. Just click the Update button when you will be requested for the coapp update, or if you prefer, you can install it right now from this link.

We understand that updating this companion application is a bit tedious if you compare to how smoothly the add-on updates, and we try to keep this requirement as seldom as possible. But in this case, we had no other choice. We apologize in advance.

Changes from 7.2.2

  • Fix: SaveAs dialogs closing unexpectedly when request CoApp downloads
  • Fix: downloads of big (>2GB) files failing with error invalid typed array length
  • Fix: YouTube file names are now taken in priority from the video metadata and not the page title that produces a "- Youtube" trailing
  • Fix: requesting a Download & Convert operation from a DASH streaming to an audio-only format caused the action to be stalled at 50%
  • Improvement: in order to minimize the impact of Video DownloadHelper to the user experience, whenever the extension opens a tab and the user closes it, the original tab is restored
  • Improvement: DASH downloads are now of much better quality with an improved management of video synchronisation frames
  • Improvement: videos from Tumblr now display a proper thumbnail
  • Fix: some running downloads did appear amongst other detected videos and not in the in the running section
  • Improvement: SaveAs dialogs now sorts file names in a case-insensitive way
  • CoApp: Converter is now based on ffmpeg 4.0
  • CoApp: Comodo IceDragon browser support
  • CoApp: include libbz2 library that is missing by default in Fedora and some other Linux distributions
  • CoApp: include libnuma library that is missing by default in GenToo and some other Linux distributions
  • CoApp: on Fedora and some other Linux distributions, the companion app manifests are now correctly installed to directory /usr/lib64
  • Reminder about Video DownloadHelper 7 and Firefox 57

    Some users still complain about some feature regressions in Video DownloadHelper 7 when compared to version 6, and the requirement to install a companion application in situations where this was not mandatory. So, we'll explain again what happened.

    When Mozilla released Firefox 57 (a.k.a Firefox Quantum) on 11/14/2017, this came with a major change: the original API (i.e the way an add-on "lives" within the browser) was removed and replaced by a new one called WebExtensions as it is in Chrome. Unfortunately this new interface is very restricted compared to the previous one and lacks a number of services that are required for Video DownloadHelper to do the job.

    Many Firefox add-on authors decided to give up and not make the move to WebExtensions. We made an other choice and decided to continue providing the service to our users by whatever mean was technically possible, rewriting almost entirely our extension.

    WebExtensions offers a clean way to run dedicated external applications and communicate with them in background. We used this to create a companion app that provides the now missing services, mainly file manipulations and unrestricted downloads. We made this app open-source to ensure transparency, and it is now required to use it for some features like HLS downloads where it could previously be performed entirely from within the add-on.

    Thank you for reading that far, you are an awesome person !