Development

Support for MP4 Downloader has been discontinued.

I don't have the time anymore to keep up with all the breaking changes that Mozilla is making in add-on development for Firefox, in addition to reacting to changes in YouTube, Dailymotion, and Vimeo that affect video downloading. Since Mozilla dropped support for traditional add-ons in November 2017, MP4 Downloader has stopped working entirely in new versions of Firefox.

The codebase has been left in the middle of a complete rewrite (see the Source Code section of the Development page), although this rewrite is not anywhere close to what is required to support new versions of Firefox. That codebase, and this website, are left here for archival purposes.

To all MP4 Downloader fans, thanks for many years of support.

--Jake Hartz

Versioning and Release Schedule Terminology

There are two main categories of MP4 Downloader versions: released versions and pre-release versions. The released versions are deemed stable for normal use; the latest released version is available for download on the download page.

Any MP4 Downloader version that is not yet released (ie. not the version available for download on the download page) is considered a "pre-release" version. There are two types of pre-release versions:

The beta channel always hosts the latest beta version of MP4 Downloader. Beta versions are considered stable enough for general testing, but not yet stable enough for a public release.
Nightly builds are automatically-generated MP4 Downloader builds based on the very latest source code in the master branch of the git repository (see below). These builds have no guarantees of stability - code in a nightly build can be completely untested.

Source Code

The source code for the MP4 Downloader Firefox add-on, the MP4 Downloader bookmarklet, and the MP4 Downloader website (including this page) is located in the git repository on GitHub: https://github.com/jhartz/mp4downloader

The MP4 Downloader Firefox add-on is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3. Its branching and tagging mechanism in the git repo is described below.
The MP4 Downloader website content is hosted in the gh-pages branch in the git repository.
The MP4 Downloader bookmarklet is also licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3. It is hosted as part of the MP4 Downloader website (the bookmarklet folder in the gh-pages branch in the git repository).

To contribute to any of these sections of the MP4 Downloader source code, just fork the repo and send a pull request.

Developer Documentation

Documentation used in the development of MP4 Downloader is located on the wiki.

Version Numbers

The version numbers for the MP4 Downloader add-on, starting with the release of MP4 Downloader 2.0.0:

MP4 Downloader version numbers follow a supermajor.major.minor pattern:
- supermajor: This number hardly ever changes - only really major updates with significant code changes merit a bump of the "supermajor" number.
- major: This number is incremented with each new release based on the trunk branch.
- minor: This number is incremented with each new release based on the previous release's codebase to fix a bug with the release ("minor release"). No new features are introduced.
Version numbers for pre-release source code on the master branch are in the form of 0.0pre where the first number is the supermajor version number and the second number is the major version number (based on the version that the code will eventually become when it is released).
Version numbers for beta versions are in the form of 0.0b0 where the first number is the supermajor version number, the second number is the major version number, and the third number is the beta release (first beta is "1", second is "2", etc.).
Occasionally, beta versions may have a version number in the form of 0.0rc if it is exactly the same as the currently released version (ie. no new beta version has been published since the last release).

Git Branching and Tagging

All new MP4 Downloader development (except urgent bugfixes) is done on in the "master" branch (or other branches intended to be merged into master once their changes are complete).
When the master branch is ready for a release, it is tagged with the new version number (v0.0 where the first number is the supermajor version number and the second number is the major version number). Likewise, beta versions are tagged similarly as well (v0.0b0 - explanation above).
When a bugfix is needed on a released version of MP4 Downloader, a new branch is created based on the tag that was assigned to that version's codebase. The new branch is named something like 2.1.x (based on major release "2.1" or tag "v2.1"). We would just keep that branch there, making a new tag inside it for each new minor release based on "v2.1". When a new major version is released (ie. "v2.2"), that branch can be deleted - any new bugfixes will go on in a new branch based on the new major version.