Hi,

FDM is very nice, but it tends to give up quickly, and often loses tasks. I live in Bénin, with a very intermittent and slow (average 200 B/s) Internet. Routinely I need 25 tries to get the DNS lookup done, more to get to a page (and then see the frames fail), the wireless sender fails on each power cut, often the server computer goes down, you name it.
FlashGet doesn't care about all this: if it has a valid link it will end up downloading the file, if it takes several weeks - but FDM mostly quits, either with a balloon message or silently. In the latter case the task disappears from the list as well. I regularly lose large movies that way, sometimes after having waited days to get 80% downloaded. Very frustrating.
Right now, after having to restart my system, I have this list of partially downloaded films. Each time I hit "Start all downloads", they start, and after a few seconds most stop, and some disappear completely. Do that a few times and all the work done is lost. Starting them one by one just does the same thing slower.
Yes, I can search for the YouTube page again and add it anew, but that will take me at least 30 minutes per film, as the whole page must load and the film actually start, which requires enormous numbers of retries.
One main problem seems to be that FDM has problems determining resumability of a link - but it doesn't allow me to assure it that a given link is resumable. Any link that supports multipart downloads is resumable, but FDM doesn't seem to know that.
Flashget, despite its name, doesn't support getting Flash from e.g. Youtube pages, whereas FDM does.

Please add to FDM:
(1) FlashGet-style doggedness and robustness;
(2) Flash video extraction as a task rather than while-you-wait.
Thank you!
Biep.

Stupidly enough, working from the "Flash videodownloads" tab, I had forgotten that from the "Downloads" tab one has access to the log file. Here it is, for one Youtube film that refuses to restart.I have no idea why one should need a user name or password to continue a download that already had started, but there it is.
I don't think I'll be able to catch the log file of a task that simply disappears on restarting, but if I do I'll try to post it here as well.

I have encountered this phenomenon also, on video sites such as Vimeo and DailyMotion. I think these sites are sending a bogus message about the password to hide what is really going on.

In the case of DM, I suspect that the site is taking extreme measures to discourage downloading. Often a download will fail to stop when it reaches 100 percent, and when that happens, the downloaded file is invariably corrupted. This happens because DM keeps changing the reported size of the file. Iwisoft Video Downloader also has trouble with that.

In the case of Vimeo, some files have a Download link. But others don't, probably because Vimeo doesn't want those files to be downloadable. So they try to make things difficult.