Varia Is A Download Manager On Steroids

so in my entire life I don't think I have ever installed and actually used on a regular basis a download manager I've always just used my web browser as my download manager right because every web browser really since the beginning of the internet every web browser has essentially managed downloads for you you just you know download whatever image or audio file or video file and you get a little progress bar and it's all built into your browser but also since the beginning of time there's always been dedicated programs specifically built to be your download manager and I've never found them particularly useful but the other day I came across one that I thought had some really unique features and I did want to showcase that on camera today this program is called varia now it's called varia because it's based on an older program a download managing program called Arya which many of you especially longtime Linux users are probably familiar with Arya and this particular program has some really neat features because it can handle downloads uh of different file types in different ways whether you're downloading audio video whether you're downloading a torrent it also has some really nice uh advanced settings options especially if you're one of those people that live in a part of the world where you have to regulate your internet usage you can actually schedule when varia will download and what hours it it shouldn't download anything so really cool program I went ahead and installed it using uh the flat pack over here on flathub it's available now also because I use the arch based system Bia is also in the a but I installed it via the flat pack and let me go ahead and launch varia and let me show you a basic way to use a download manager so if I go back to my browser I went to this website here I just did a quick Google search for downloading example files and I came to file examples.com - examples.com and let's browse let's browse for a video file so I'm just going to grab one of these files I'll right click and let's go ahead and copy the link and then I'm going to go back to varia and here in this URL bar just paste that URL and go ahead and click the download button and away it goes download complete now in that case it actually I I actually copied a link to the HTML file so it actually download the web page and not the MP4 that I was actually trying to grab but that is fine if I go back and actually grab the proper link for the MP4 and hit download just to verify that it does download audio files and you grab that as well and of course if these are bigger files you'll have your progress bar you'll see a percentage as it goes along you can also pause or unpause the download if you need to but you notice when you have the URLs pasted here you have the download button that that lights up or the video audio button that lights up let me show you what that video audio button is because that really is one of the coolest features of this I'm going to go to my YouTube page and let me grab the link to one of my recent videos let me go ahead and grab that link and I'm going to go back to varia and now I'm going to paste the URL and now the buttons light up I can click either download or video/ audio now what is video/ audio well if you're grabbing a video from any site that can use the program YT DLP you guys know what that program is it downloads audio video files to your local system from various websites on the internet just click the video audio button and you can see it's checking the video and then it gives me all the various download options as far as resolution of the video what type of audio file I want you know how I want them merged together when it downloads this locally to my machine basically it's all the same options if you were using ytdl at the command line you would see all these options but this gives it in graphical form that is really really really unique you'll notice you also have this dedicated torrent button here you could click on that it opens your file picker so anytime you download a torrent file you know you just go grab that you know click the button go grab it out of your file picker and it will start downloading your Torrance for you so not not only is it a a download manager in the traditional sense it also kind of is your bit torrent client so it really is kind of a neat jack of all trades kind of program now there's a couple of different menu systems here you may or may not find some of these options all that interesting uh in this menu system here you have background mode you click on that the window just goes away it's running in the background it's still downloading your stuff but you don't have the window right here up front of course you can open your downloads folder that's just going to open your file manager then you have completion options now this may be interesting because this allows you to tell varia to exit on completion of download or to shut down on completion of download and then you have this menu here with some more advanced options you may or may not need uh the most interesting one though I think is the scheduler option you see scheduler change and here you can go ahead and enable when to download during these times or when to stop downloading during these times you just click the sliders on or off and then you add your time span so day of the week and then the hours and of course you would click save and you that would be fine now for where I'm at I'm pretty much I've got good internet 24 hours a day but again depending on what part of the world you're in you could be limited on the hours you can download one other cool thing is there are browser extensions available for Firefox and chromium based uh web browsers now I use Brave if I use the Chrome based plug-in system here right and when I click that button in varia here in my Brave browser it opened the page to add the varia extension to Brave I can click that ADD extension you give it permission and now I have the extension here in Brave so I've got some integration with my browser and varia other settings you can play with you have torrent settings if you need to play with that whether you want to allow seating or not and then you also have this advanced settings button and this is where you can add authentication add a username and password you can also disable remote mode so this will disable video download functionality if I end up keeping varia on my system I probably won't need any of these advanced settings I did install the browser extension but the rest of this I'm pretty much set on so there you have it a very quick introduction to what I think is a really cool program I really didn't expect to ever like a download manager as much as I like varia here now before I go I need to thank a few special people I need to thank the producers of this episode and of course I'm talking about Matt Steve armor Dragon capk man darlo dless George Lee methos Aran Paul Peace Arch and Fedora real for lless red profit Roland waru and abun and Willie these guys there might have steered patrons over on patreon without these guys this quick look at varia the download manager would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon I don't have any corporate sponsors I'm sponsored by you guys the community if you like my work want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software like varia subscribe to Dro tube over on patreon peace guys