Thursday, February 10, 2011

Sabnzbd+ News Reader


If you've ever used Usenet (nntp, newsgroups, whatever you want to call it) to download movies, music, tv shows, or other large files you probably know how much of a hassle it is with a standard news reader.  Having to download all of the seperate parts of each seperate rare file of each item you want to download and decode them from yenc and then unrar and/or use a program to join them and then have to search for a par file to repair missing files is a pain in the butt.  NZB files helped a great deal with this.  These were a single file that told a news reader application which articles on usenet to download to get all of a specific file(s) you were looking for.  You still needed a news reader that would accept these files and you had to load them manually.  You also still had to join and/or unrar the files once you downloaded them.  Still a pain, but not for long...

Today we have Sabnzbd+.  This oddly named application is an open source "fully automated" news reader written in python and compatible with windows, linux, and mac os x.  This application will take some getting used to if you are a seasoned veteran of standard news readers like Forte Agent or xnews.  This application has a webpage interface.  It can be accessed locally or remotely.  You just tell it which usenet server or servers (it can use more than one) to use and feed it an nzb file and it will download the files for you as well as join and unrar them for you.  If there are missing or corrupted files it will grab par files to repair it for you as well.  It also supports ipv6 connections unlike many traditional news readers.  This can be very useful since there are a few fairly fast and free ipv6 news servers available if you can connect.  It can also integrate with nzbmatrix if you have an account, making finding nzb files even easier.

Conclusion:  If you use Usenet, you need Sabnzbd+.  The only thing it can't do is read text posts from usenet, but who does that anymore anyway?

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