Downloading Batch Media with IDM With A Schedule.

Part 1: Downloading shows for short term watching. 

Most people watch a show and move on afterward, rewatching in a year or two if they liked it. If you fall into these people, there is no reason to save a show that could be 10 gigs on your hard drive. Using IDM, (internet download manager) you can download a show overnight, watch the next day and delete it afterward. 

You will need a computer for this, speed does not matter much if your only using it to download and moving the videos to another place to watch.  

Get IDM from the following link and Install the application to your computer.

https://www.internetdownloadmanager.com/

IDM has a trial period, however, which is ok for people who only want to download videos a few times, but bad for people like us. Thankfully, a tool was made to reset this trial period when it nears its end.

https://github.com/J2TEAM/idm-trial-reset/releases

Use this tool every 20-29 days to reset the trial. You can use the license register, but it has never worked for me so I don't recommend it. 

After installing IDM and IDM-Trial-Reset, we will configure IDM to auto download files you give it. Click the options button on the top and click connection. Change the connection type to high speed, and leave 'default max connections'. If people use the internet late into the night as well, close the options panel, and click downloads. Turn on the speed limiter and open the settings tab. Check 'Always turn on Speed Limiter on IDM startup'. Set the maximum download speed to a comfortable speed. My computer gets around 3-5 megabytes per second so I set the speed to 2000kb when I need to limit the speed. Megabytes are 1024 kb big, but the small 24 kb does not really matter when downloading overnight. You can do the math if you want to finish the downloads a few minutes faster, but that's up to you. 

Next, find the series you would like to download. I watch quite a bit of anime, so I find a series by friend suggestion, or through anime indexers like myanimelist. Once I find a series that I like, I find a download link for IDM. This can be the most frustrating part of the process, as there are a lot of things that can go wrong in the downloading process. Links can have download thread caps, which stop IDM from downloading the video in parts to speed it up. Some download hosts also don't allow multiple downloads from the same network, forcing you to download one video at a time. IDM can download as many videos at a time, as long as you set it up in the settings, more on that later. 

Lists of places to download videos are abundant, but I have a few starting locations that I go to when I look for links. Look for ddl or download in the description the sites contained in lists. Avoid sites that contain torrents for now, as IDM is not for torrenting. Forums will also contain links for downloads, but those usually require signup, I rarely if ever use them. 

(Links Removed for site rule reasons)

Download links can also be fetched from videos that are being played by IDM. This requires the IDM Integration Module to be installed for your browser. This is either an extension for browsers like Firefox and Chrome or an extension in the Microsoft store for Edge. Once it is installed, a little popup will appear when you play a video, asking if you want to download the video. You can either download the video outright or save it to download later. If you want to download later, you can do one of two options. Save the URL to use later in some way, or save the download to Queue. Saving to a Queue lets you set IDM to download it at a specific time, or batch downloads everything in the queue now or at a specific time. 

Now that you have a download link, we need to determine what to do with it. Look at the download link and see if it has any indication that it's for a specific episode. If the link is just gibberish followed by .mp4 or whatever video codec it is, it can be thrown into a queue for later, it cant be used much. Find the other links for the other episodes and save them into the queue for later, we will be configuring it to download. If it does have an episode indicator, we can use the URL to grab the other episodes that we want. In the main IDM page, click tasks and click 'add batch download'. Paste the URL you have into the 'Address' bar and change the episode number to an asterisk. For example, if I had a link that was: "www.download.com/my-show-ep-01.mp4", I would change it to: "www.download.com/my-show-ep-0*.mp4". After changing the URL, set the 'replace asterisk to' to Numbers and set the 'from' numbers to the range of episodes to find. This is usually 1-9 or 0-9 for the first batch grab. The grab cannot determine 10-99 unless you set the first number in the chain. We will grab the rest of the episodes in the series later, for now, we need to add the episodes we have into a queue. 

After clicking ok, it will search the URL for any episodes and report back some information on it like the size of the file. on the bottom left, you can set IDM to download the file to a specific location on your computer. If you don't set it, IDM will make a folder called videos in your download folder. You can find your videos in there after IDM is finished downloading them. After clicking Ok in the bottom right corner, you can set the download to be added into a queue. I usually use the synchronization queue. Check 'start queue processing' if you want the download to begin after you finished. 

As I said before, the grab cannot determine 10-99 unless you set the first number in the chain. An example of this is, "www.download.com/my-show-ep-0*.mp4", set to "www.download.com/my-show-ep-1*.mp4" for episodes 10-19. Change the first number and search parameters until satisfied. Repeat the steps to load all the files into the download queue. 

Next, we have to set up IDM to download at a specific time. On the left collum, click the drop-down for queues and right-click synchronization queue. Click schedule and set 'start download time at'. I have set this to 11 pm or 12 pm to allow a bit of leeway if I'm browsing late at night. After that, set the 'Stop download at' to when you want IDM to stop all downloads if there are any left. I have this set to 8 Am because some in my house like to rise early. You can go more into detail on setting up a schedule for IDM to follow, but those are the two main things to set. Another thing I use however is 'Number of retries for each file', this allows IDM to auto-restart errored or failed downloads without me having to do it myself. On the bottom of the tab, you can set IDM to do things after it's done downloading your files. I don't have any of this stuff checked, but you can use it to turn off your computer or kill IDM afterward.