Monday, November 15, 2010

Anti reCAPTCHA for JDownloader

UPDATE: I've noticed that this article gets quite a lot of hits, but for now it seems that this Anti reCAPTCHA isn't working for the current version, 0.2f, ever since reCAPTCHA updated. Still, just check if the author has an update that works, or a workaround, and let me know in the comments. Lord Inglip sure is powerful enough against this system.

UPDATE 2: There is an alternative method called CaptchaTrader (thanks for the comment James). Head to my new post for more information.

UPDATE 3: Apparently the original author didn't seem to be updating this anymore. However this project has been taken over by SONY-TEAM, and does seem to work. Here is the real link: http://antirecaptcha.com/. Other links such as "http://www.anti-recaptcha.com/" is most likely fake and tries to rip off unsuspecting users.

If you're a download maniac, you should have at least heard about JDownloader. If not, then you're not downloading enough. It automates your downloads from various file sharing services, so you don't have to babysit your downloads, such as waiting times, typing in CAPTCHAs, etc. As the name hints, you'll need Java (JRE or JDK) to run it.

Download JDownloader

The annoying thing about downloading a lot of stuff from these file sharing services is that they imply A LOT OF LIMITATIONS unless you buy a premium account. That includes typing in reCAPTCHAs, an anti-bot system. While JDownloader automates most of the stuff, it can't really decipher these reCAPTCHAs. You still have to do this manually.

But hey, some German programmer built an anti reCAPTCHA system, just for JDownloader. And while it doesn't work all the time, it will retry until it gets it right. So you can really leave JDownloader to do it's dirt.

Download anti reCAPTCHA

This thing runs on PHP, so you'll need Visual C++ Redistributable 2008 (vcredist2008) installed.

But still, I got CLI (which is php.exe) error. After realizing that php.exe caused the error, I tried replacing it (as well as other related PHP files) with a newer version from 5.3.1 to 5.3.3 (VC9 Thread Safe). And it works! Now I can walk away with my downloads running happily.

Note that I didn't really install PHP, I simply copied the file with same names in the antirecaptcha folder from the downloaded zip file.

Download PHP 5.3.3

Well I've already informed to the author about this, and he said he'll update it by the end of the week. So you don't have to go through all the trouble I had just now.

Should work best with FileServe, but I heard there were problems with other file sharing sites that use reCAPTCHA. I only tried it with FileServe though.