Monday, September 4, 2017
Download large files from Baidu quickly with resume but without requiring an account
Download large files from Baidu quickly with resume but without requiring an account
If you find yourself in the position of having to download a file that is only available on Baidu, but you live outside China, then you will find yourself in a difficult situation - its very tricky to get an account outside of China, due to the requirement of having a Chinese mobile phone number.
With the help of a Tampermonkey script inside Google Chrome, however, you can bypass the requirement to have an account and simply download the file you are after!
Install the Tampermonkey extension
1. Open Google Chrome on your PC
2. Go into Chromes Settings
3. Click on Extensions and tick the Developer mode check box at the top right of the page
4. At the bottom of the page, click on the Get more extensions link
5. Search for, and install, Tampermonkey Beta
Install the Baidu Download Script
1. Go to the BaiduPanDownloadHelper script page
2. Click on Install this script
Once the script is installed, you should be able to click on a Baidu download link and the file will download without prompting you to install the Disk client
Speed up the Download with a Download Manager
Downloads from China are notoriously slow, due to the lack of bandwidth between China and the outside world. To speed things up, we can use a download manager, which will create multiple concurrent connections to the file, each downloading a separate chunk of data.
While there are multiple download managers available (e.g. Free Download Manager), there is another consideration to make when downloading large files - downloads from Baidu will time out after a couple of hours and cannot be resumed (unique URLs are created for each download).
What is needed is a Download Manager which allows us to continue to download a partially downloaded file with a new URL.
Add Resume from a new source capability with the uGet Download Manager
uGet is a primarily a Linux tool, but a Windows Portable App is also available, which is what I tend to use.
uGet is an Open Source project and can be downloaded from their website here:
http://ugetdm.com/
When initiating a Baidu download from Chrome, open the Download tab where we can find the URL that has been generated for our download.
Open uGet, click on the "Create a new download" button and paste in the URL from Chrome. Note that the Max number of connections cannot go above 16, so the default is likely the best option for our download.
If the performance of your download drops off significantly or stops, it is likely that most or all the download threads have timed out. This is when we need to reconnect the download to a new source.
Initiate a new download of the file from Chrome and copy the new URL into the Windows copy buffer.
Pause the download in uGet, open the Properties of the download and paste the new URL into the URI field. This should re-initiate a download to the new source, keeping all existing file data.
download file now
