Smart Naming feature

Introduced in version 4.5, the feature addresses a common issue: obtaining a meaningful file name for a downloaded video file.

Most of Video DownloadHelper detections and captures are performed by monitoring the HTTP requests and responses between the browser and the server. In order to provide a default file name, the system uses only the information contained into the HTTP headers. For some sites, this method works well, i.e. the file name is similar to the video title, but in general, the default proposed file name is something like 5432142.flv.

The Smart Naming feature allows to associate a portion of the HTML page containing the video, the part holding the video title, with the corresponding entry in the download menu. As the title is generally always at the same place on a given site, making the association once works for all the videos on this site.

Using the feature

Nothing better than an example:

In this page, the video appears in the download menu with name 3915499.mp4.

The process consists of selecting (highlighting with the mouse) the video title in the page (or a part of this title), and right clicking in the page to display the context menu. This shows a new menu, Smart naming, with sub-menu entry Define media title location. Note that if you did not select anything, the last menu entry won't appear.

The opening dialog prompts for a confirmation.

Once done, the download menu now displays a correct title that will be used as the default file name. Better, this will now work automatically with all videos on this site.

Sharing title positions

There is an even simpler way to configure the title location: importing a database of known sites. This can be done from either the context menu, in sub-menu entry Import or by clicking the Import button in the preferences, section Capture, tab Smart Naming.

This database is maintained automatically from statistics sent anonymously by users. You can disable automatic statistics sending from the preferences, but keep in mind that will make the whole service less efficient.

Configuration

See this page for details.

Advanced

In the title location dialog, you can expand the window by clicking on Advanced.

The location of the media title is determined by an XPath expression to locate the title HTML element in the page, associated with a regular expression to do some string manipulation.

The XPath expression is generated automatically from the mouse selection, but if you are an expert and want to edit the XPath by hand, prefer expressions like .//div[@id='title'] to the default one, as it will be more robust to HTML page changes.

You can use the regular expression to remove some part of the title string. For instance, if the capture always gives something like Title: the video title, you certainly want to get rid of the leading Title:. In that case, use Title: (.*), instead of the default .*.

You may have noticed that in addition to capturing the title of the media, it is also possible to define the media description. This will be used in future services.

Issues

By nature, the Smart Naming cannot work for 100% of the sites. Typical issues are:

• Media title not being displayed in the page
• Media title being displayed with the flash player (it cannot be captured from HTML)
• Sites using AJAX to define the content instead of loading a new page per media (often the case in music broadcast sites)
• Title being moved within the page by the site designer. The actual title won't be found at the expected location in the page or it will pick a erroneous part of text as being the title

However, as this works for the large majority of sites, we thought we should have this feature.