Newsgroups made Easy (Windows and Linux)
If you’re into filesharing, but don’t like the viruses, spam and everything awful about P2P clients (like Limewire, Kazaa), you might want to look into using newsgroups. I can consistently max out my bandwidth downloading from a news server (vs the sometimes slow speeds of P2P). With the new do-it-all newsgrabber programs out there like GrabIt, getting a movie or a CD has never been easier. Of course, Linuxdave only uses this for non-copyrighted material, and suggests that my readers do the same, if they wish to stay within the boundaries of the law.
It looks like a lot at first, but after everything is installed and setup, it is a very fast and very easy process.
You need a few things:
* A newsgroup hosting server account at newshosting.com
* A newsgroup client (to actually get the files).. I use GrabIt
Detailed instructions:
1) Go to newshosting.com and sign up for one of their accounts. I like the unlimited 14.95 plan. The “retention” time is simply how long the files are available on the servers for. For example, if someone posted a movie 60 days ago to the newsgroups, you would be able to get it with that plan, but not with the 45-retention day plan. I find everything I need with the 45 plan though.
Also keep in mind that most DVDs are between 4 and 7 GB, so the 10GB plan just seems to restrictive to me. After signing up they will send you an email with all the info that you need to get set up.
2) Go get Grabit. Make sure “Associate GrabIt with NZB Files” is checked when installing. When starting for the first time:
* News (NNTP) server: (they sent this to you in the email)
* Check “requires username and password”
* Enter username/password sent in email
Thats it!
Now lets get some files:
3) Now, you can use Grabit right now to browse and download the groups and files if you want, but there is a much easier way of getting what you want. They are called NZBs. NZBs are just files that tell GrabIt which posts to download in order to build the movie/game/whatever you want. The best site out there right now for this is newzbin.org, but it costs a few bucks. This site is just a community of people that create these NZB files and uploads them to make our lives easier. Sign up for an account, add some “premium credit” to it for a few bucks, and go ahead and search for a music CD or movie or something. After clicking on the item you want to download, you’ll be presented with a list of files that will be downloaded to build what you are looking for. Simply click “Get Message-IDs” and rest should be automatic: Grabit will start its thing, and the download process will start. At this point, make sure Grabit is using all 8 download streams. That is the maximum number of download streams you can have with newshosting.com. Note: you won’t see that “Get Message-IDs” button unless you have premium credit and an account.
4) After the file has been downloaded and uncompressed, the latest version of Grabit will automatically run the parity check and unrar it for you. You should see a directory with your files in the GrabIt Download folder!
Lots of times the files that you’re getting will simply be images of the DVD or CD that it came on originally. If you aren’t sure how to deal with these, doing some googling will help. Generally the easiest thing to do is just to burn the image back onto media (DVD, CD, whatever). If you’re just looking to watch the movie/Tv show on your computer, I’d suggest getting a divx version of the show if it is available on newzbin. The quality will be fine for most computer monitors, and it will take a tenth of the time to download.
If you need a decent video player to play files that you download, I highly recommend getting VLC Media Player.
Wait! I came here because I use Linux, LINUXDAVE!
Well, if you use Windows, you can stop reading here, you’re done! If you use Linux, this process is the same with one minor change…
Unfortunately, GrabIt only works in Windows. We will need to replace it with two programs, one to download what the NZB specifies, and one to do the parity check (thats what all the .par or .par2 files are for).
Pan is an easy-to-use GTK+ client for Linux. As for installing something to do the parity check… this is a one liner in Ubuntu:
apt-get install par2
I won’t bore you with the details on how to use these. If you’re using Linux, you should know how to read man pages by now!
VLC Media Player also works great in Linux for playing videos!
Let me know if you have any questions about newsgroups in Linux or Windows.
