limit VDH to particular tab(s) or run as needed?

[Cpgeek]

I use VDH in firefox where I often have thousands of tabs open, and it seems that by default when VDH is active, it wants to scan every single one of them which results in HUGE resource waste when I'm only trying to download videos maybe 1% of the time or less.

Is there a way that I can set VDH to only be enabled on a particular tab / page that could then refresh the page so VDH could do it's detection thing and grab the video that I'm after rather than scanning EVERYTHING all the time?  I'm really just looking for ways that I can limit VDH from doing anything on pages where I don't want to download videos from at any given moment.  I'm certainly open to suggestions for how I can improve my use.

Thank you!

[Wild Willy]

The only thing I can think of is so much trouble, I wouldn't do it.  You'd have to define multiple Firefox profiles, but install VDH in only one of them.  Avoid that profile most of the time.  For most of your web surfing, use only profiles in which you have not installed VDH.  When you find a page where you want to download something, load it using your profile that has VDH.

Instead of the profile trick, there is also the VDH Reload extension function.  You can find out about that over here:

https://groups.google.com/g/video-downloadhelper-q-and-a/c/BzPLK2YyL-s

Do a string search on "reload" in that thread.  You'll find a link that explains, complete with screenshots, how to reload VDH.  Reloading VDH clears out all the resources it is using.  It empties the VDH menu in every active tab.  It also closes & relaunches the CoApp.  But beware.  Don't just use it any old time.  If you have any inflight downloads going on in VDH, reloading the extension will abruptly terminate them all & you'll have to start them over from scratch.  But if you aren't downloading anything, doing a Reload extension will clear out all those resources you're concerned about.  After you do the reload, VDH will of course start incrementally using up resources again.  So you'll have to do a reload every every once in a while.  But at least it will keep a lid on things.

Best I got.

[Cpgeek]

Thank you, I appreciate your help!

[Maximillium]

You might try a Firefox extension called "OneTab" - you can keep all those tabs instantly available

in a searchable list, save all that memory, instantly reload a tab when you want it.

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[mig]

Just a small remark here: you (the OP) might be under the impression that VDH searches for video links within all the open pages, hence having a large number of tabs might cause VDH to do a lot of work. This is not the way it works. VDH "watches" at low level the HTTP network requests and responses. When it sees something that looks like a video, it handles it. So, if you have more or less tabs, it does not change the work VDH has to do.

As Wild Willy suggested, you may want to use 2 separate browser user profiles, VDH being installed on the only profile you want to download videos from.

However, i suggest making some tests enabling/disabling VDH in order to check whether it has an impact on the overall CPU load. I suspect it has not.