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Automated Mode Opening Links in Downie

Automation

Downie can be used in various automated workflows as well. This help topic will cover this.

Automated Mode

From time to time, Downie needs to show you some kind of a prompt (login dialog, subtitle selection, etc.). If you are away from the machine, this can be unwanted as it blocks the UI and processing of the links in the background. For this, there is the "automated mode" which can be enabled in Settings > Advanced. When run in automated mode, Downie will suppress all dialogs. Please keep in mind that this has its risks - e.g. if Downie requires you to login, it will cancel the attempt automatically and the download will fail.

The main question now is how to open a link in Downie. There are several options.

If you just need to open a link in Downie, then it's simple - if you are using a shell (command line), use the open command:

open -a 'Downie 4' 'https://www.example.com/'

Several notes:

  • if you are running a Setapp version, use Downie instead of Downie 4
  • & is a shell operator. Make sure that the link is surrounded by single or double quotes.

If you are using Apple Script, use the open command:

tell application "Downie 4"
	open location "https://www.example.com/"
end tell

In Automator, you can use the Open URLs in Downie Automator action.

Sometimes, you want some links to be opened with particular postprocessing, or even in the User-Guided Extraction. For this, Downie uses a custom scheme downie://. Here is an example:

downie://XUOpenURL?url=https://www.example.com/&postprocessing=audio

Let's break this down. The first part downie://XUOpenURL is fixed. After that, there is the query separator (?) and regular URL query parameters. In URLs, query parameters are separated by & and are in format name=value. In this case, there are two parameters - url (whose value is https://www.example.com/) and postprocessing whose value is audio.

There are several supported parameters:

  • url - required - this is fairly obvious. This is the actual link you want to open. Please make sure that the link is URL-encoded. This mainly means that all & characters within the link must be encoded. Example: if the link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSc2gwNrc8M&ab_channel=VisualGolf - you can notice that the link itself contains ? and &. If you pasted the link into the Downie custom link just as-is, you'd get:
  • ❌ downie://XUOpenURL?url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSc2gwNrc8M&ab_channel=VisualGolf&postprocessing=audio - which is wrong as it will be interpreted incorrectly - the ab_channel parameter will not be interpreted as part of the url, it will be interpreted as an additional argument of the Downie custom link. The correct link would be:
  • ✅ downie://XUOpenURL?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DeSc2gwNrc8M%26ab_channel%3DVisualGolf&postprocessing=audio - this is the ideal representation, though the minimum you need to really encode is the ? and & characters - this will also be accepted: downie://XUOpenURL?url=https://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv=eSc2gwNrc8M%26ab_channel=VisualGolf&postprocessing=audio. To make it super easy for you, make sure that you replace ? with %3F and & with %26.
  • postprocessing - optional - set a certain postprocessing. Allowed values are:
  • mp4 - MP4 postprocessing
  • audio - extract audio only
  • permute - send to Permute
  • destination - optional - path to destination folder. Make sure that the folder exists.
  • action - optional - perform certain action. Currently there's only one action.
  • open_in_uge - opens the link in the User-Guided Extraction. Ignores the postprocessing argument.
  • title - optional - sets custom title for the download. Note that this requires the link to be directly supported by Downie. If the link passed is not supported, even though Downie may extract some download links in the webpage source code, the extra indirection will lose this parameter passed.

Once you have this custom link, the workflow is the same - either use the open -a 'Downie 4' 'downie://...' shell command or use the same with Apple Script.