I wrote the following very basic beginner's tutorial to help out users on another site which i work on. Since there's not a lot of documentation for jDownloader yet, i figured you can have this if you want until the full documenation comes online.

Haven't used this app for very long myself so excuse any errors in my method.

Rgds,
/heck


Beginner's Tutorial
The purpose of this beginner’s tutorial is to introduce how to use JDownloader, in a very basic fashion, to download a set of Rapidshare links, which have been found on a webpage and to automatically extract those downloaded files to whatever file(s) they contain. i.e. a set of rapidshare links may contain a single avi or a folder containing a number of files.

Jargon
RS – Rapidshare


Procedure
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1. When you first start it up, the chances are you see a dialog box similar to Image A. Just click “OK” to download the available downloads.

2. Don’t worry if you don’t see a dialog box like that shown below. This just means that jDownloader is already totally up to date. If it's upto date then skip to step 4.

Image A


3. You’ll now see a dialog box like Image B. Just click “OK” and let jDownloader install the updates.

Image B


4. You’ll now see the main jDownloader window, as in Image C.

Image C


5. At this point go to the webpage, with the RS links you want to download from. Select them all, then Right-click and copy them all. (See Image D). Don’t forget to make note of any password, as you’ll require that later.

Image D


6. Now go back to jDownloader and select “File -> Add -> Add Links” as shown in Image E.

Image E


7. The “Add Links” window will open with the links you previously copied already in there. (see Image F). If you find the links aren’t in that window or there’s some other rubbish there, just delete the unwanted stuff and manually copy and paste in the required links.

Image F


8. When the links are satisfactory click “Add” as shown above, in Image F.

9. The ”Link Collector” window will now open. (see Image G below).

10. Item 1 is the package name. This is useful if you want to queue up multiple sets of RS links to download. If you are just downloading one set of links, as in the example, then this can be left as “various”.

11. Item 2 is the directory where you want the RS files (and the file(s) extracted from them) to be stored.

12. If the RS links came with a password (see Image D) then put it at Item 3, otherwise just leave this blank.

Image G


13. Item 4 in Image G, should be ticked to ensure that the files downloaded from RS get extracted.

14. The column marked by Item 5 above, shows the status of the files at each of the RS links. In the example all the files are available and so are marked online. In reality some of the files may not be available for download (e.g. links are dead or RS servers offline) so some of these files may show as offline.

15. If all the links show as “online” then click “Accept all” (Item 6 above).

Image H


16. You’ll now get a window similar to the one in Image H. Just clicked the Green arrow to start the download.

17. If you’re using the ordinary non-pay version of RS, then there’s a wait time before each individual file can be downloaded. See Image I

Image I


18. Image J just shows what completed files look like in the jDownloader display. (i.e. File 001 and File 002)

Image J


19. As you can see in image J, there are two parts downloaded and we’re waiting for permission to download part 3.

20. You can bypass the wait time by changing your IP address (e.g. switching your modem/router combination off/on usually achieves this) but most people don’t bother doing this, as they prefer to just start jDownloader and forget about it until everything is finished.

21. It is also possible to grant jDownloader access to your modem so that it (jDownloader), can reset your modem in order to get a new IP address, but that’s beyond the scope of this beginner’s tutorial.

22. When all of the RS files are successfully downloaded, then jDownloader will automatically extract the contents of them and put that in the folder specified by Item 2 of Image G.


Rgds,
/heck

[pspzockerscene]

Nice one but soon the JD will have a new look so you will maybe have to make new screens^^
I also promised that i can make video tutorials but i wait for the new update to be released so i can start making the vids.

sticky. until we release the new version.

I'll be doing an updated version, with the new screenshots, for the site where i work, so it's no problem to update here also at the same time.

Will the auto update feature handle the update to the new version or will a clean install be necessary ?

Just curious as if it auto updates then i'll easily notice when the new version is out and can update the tutorial accordingly.

Rgds,
/heck

Good comprehensive Tutorial, heck. Versions will be updating but meanwhile, a couple of observations.

The Add Files Screen (Image F): Altho narrower than the URL, it is a GREAT place to check the URLs and correct them if needed. Sometimes the URL errors don't show up where you are copying them from but they WILL when they appear in the Add Files Screen and that is a good time to scroll across the window and make sure that there are no spaces, double periods, etc. that will fail your download. As this screen is editable, no need to pass a broken URLs first to Notepad to fix it, fix it right in the Add Files Screen! (Good work, JD)

Passwords (Image G #3): Yes, put the password here (observing capitalizations or not and numbers, no Capital "O" for zero) but you can ALSO add it to the Password List at Addons/JD-Unrar/Password List, "just in case", as it appears that JD checks there if you forgot to put the password in the Linkcollector. And the double check will happen when you get the Linkcollector Screen (Image G) as one (or more) entries will fail if the URL is not correct.

Ali

[Gweilo]

This should go in the Wiki.

There are a lot of stubs and outdated articles there. Half the "help" links in JD itself are wiki articles that have a title and nothing else.

Why not let users contribute to it? You can easily roll back vandalism or spamming in a wiki, and block the user subsequently.

[Gweilo]

Originally Posted by whattheheck

20. You can bypass the wait time by changing your IP address (e.g. switching your modem/router combination off/on usually achieves this) but most people don’t bother doing this, as they prefer to just start jDownloader and forget about it until everything is finished.

21. It is also possible to grant jDownloader access to your modem so that it (jDownloader), can reset your modem in order to get a new IP address, but that’s beyond the scope of this beginner’s tutorial.

Rapidshare's wait between downloads is now 15 minutes, but previously it was up to 2 hours. And who knows if they might change it back. So it is worthwhile to get the "Reconnect" feature, which renews your IP automatically as needed, working so as not to be suddenly blocked for hours at a time, even if you don't mind the 15 minutes now. And other hosting sites do have much longer timeouts already.

I close the topic and unstick it since we released new version with new GUI.