Usenet Downloading Guide
With reports that BayTSP is active again sending out copyright infringement notices again for certain unlicensed anime, there are a few options if you got caught or don't ever want to even take the chance of getting caught.
One of the options is to simply stop downloading anime. For those who don't find that an option, there is also
IRC. But before the advent of BitTorrent, Usenet was a popular place to get fansubs too, at least for me.
What's Usenet?
Usenet is a distributed internet discussion network. It's like a forum, except that every "post" to every "thread" is automatically distributed among all servers in the Usenet network. Usenet is one of the oldest internet protocols and is approximately 30 years old.
Few people probably use Usenet for (text) discussions anymore - or if they do, they're using
Google Groups rather than a real Usenet client. Like email however, it's possible to add binary attachments to message and use it to distribute files.
Advantages & Disadvantages
There is nothing with its ups and downs. First, here are some of the disadvantages of Usenet:
- It's not free
Or more precisely, good quality Usenet servers aren't free. If you are lucky your ISP might provide a Usenet server for you to use, but the retention (how long files stay on the server) and completion (whether you'll be able to download the files completely) is likely to be crap.
Fortunately Usenet providers usually aren't terribly expensive. And some (like my favorite, Astraweb) offer "Pay per Download" accounts, which means no monthly subscription. Some also allow PayPal payments, which is useful if you don't have a credit card. See this site for more Usenet providers:
- Usenet wasn't designed for binary files
It was designed for text discussions. But people found out you could encode binaries and post them as Usenet messages. However, the are a few problems:- Each message can be only a few KB in size
- As a result, each file is split up in hundreds, if not thousands of Usenet messages
- To improve completion, files are usually split (using file splitters or RAR)
- Finding all messages and parts of every file can be tricky and/or time consuming
- If a single message is missing, you might be screwed, unless somebody reposts it
But don't let that discourage you. Innovations like NZB files (more info below) and PAR files (again more info below) resolve a lot of these issues.
- Usenet sucks for fansubs these days
You can find lots of anime on Usenet - except most aren't fansubs (if you know what I mean) and if they are fansubs, there is little choice between groups and/or they're posted days or weeks late.
This is not a problem I have an easy fix for, except for people to get more active in posting fansubs to Usenet. Fortunately posting files is pretty easy, but I'll leave that for a future guide.
And here are the advantages:
- It's not free
Why is this an advantage you may ask? Well, because you're paying money specifically for the privilege of getting Usenet access, the service provided by such Usenet providers tends to be really good:- Very fast servers for fast downloads
- Multiple connections allowed to download even faster
- File completion is excellent to perfect
- Retention is insane - some providers strive to offer a year of retention
- If you're paranoid, some providers offer SSL connections
- Private & Secure
The only party that knows what you're downloading (especially if you're using SSL connections) is your Usenet provider. And guess what? Quite a few of them don't keep logs! Also if copyright enforces ever go after Usenet they're likely to go after the providers only, so as a downloader you're very likely to remain safe.
- Leech all you want
Unlike BitTorrent, you don't need to share anything back to cloud, because there is no cloud.
- Usenet isn't just for anime
You can find er, lost of "other" content too. I'll leave that up to your imagination.
NZB files
An average list of files posted to an anime related newsgroup on Usenet may look like this:
Needless to say, it's a real pain to sift through this. Fortunately a site called
Newzbin (which is now invitation only) created a file format in which the message ID (location) of every part of every file can be described.
Using such NZB files, a Usenet client can then easily start downloading all parts. Simply put, a NZB file is like a torrent file in that it makes finding files on Usenet a lot easier:
Despite the original Newzbin site being effectively closed, NZB is fortunately an open format that is offered by many other sites, such as:
PAR files
Apart of the problem of finding files is the problem that your Usenet server may be missing one or more parts of the file. PAR files were invented to solve this problem.
PAR files can be used as "glue" that can be used to replace bad or missing files (v1+v2) or to repair damaged files (v2 only). So if a part of a file or even a whole file didn't make it, you can still repair it.
There are two PAR versions:
- Version 1
This version is hardly used anymore, because it can not be used to repair files (only to replace missing or damaged ones) and every PAR file needs to be as big as the biggest file in the set.
- Version 2
This is the most commonly used version these days. It can repair damaged files, and does not need to be the same size of other files in the set. This means you can grab a PAR2 file that's just as large as the parts you are missing.
More information on how to use PAR files can be found in the guide section below.
Interesting fact: although they're now used in pretty much every binary newsgroup, PAR files were invented by posters from anime newsgroups.
The Guide
Step 1 - Get a Usenet client
There are tons of Usenet clients, but for downloading from Usenet using NZB files I personally recommend
NZB-O-Matic Plus, because it's a no-nonsense little application that does just what it needs to do and no more. It's simplicity makes it easy to use.
After installation, set up your Usenet server first. Note that you may need to manually adjust the port if you want to use SSL.
In the
Options menu, modify the Preferences to similar what you see in the screenshot. Except for the folder locations of course, feel free to set those to anything you want.
As you can see NZB-O-Matic Plus can also monitor a folder for you, like uTorrent can. This may be useful if you want to automate downloading.
Step 2 - Start downloading
Obtain the NZB file of what you want to download (on one of the sites I listed above), and open it with "Loader" (the utlity application that loads the file into NZB-O-Matic Plus) or use
File ->
Import NZB... in the menu.
Don't forget to hit
Connect on the
Usenet Servers tab or the download won't start.
Note the download speed and the expected download time!
If you configured NZB-O-Matic Plus as in the second screenshot, any PAR2 files will be paused until you need them (or delete them in case you didn't need them).
Step 3 - Verify the download
After download, you should have a list of files that looks like this:
To verify and re-assemble the file, use a tool called
QuickPar.
After installation you may want to alter the options so that QuickPar will automatically start working once you double-click a PAR file.
If everything went correct, you see something like this: not only did QuickPar verify the split files, it also assembled them into one file!
If some part of the file is damaged or missing, QuickPar will notify you of how many parts it needs. You can then download those with NZB-O-Matic Plus.
Instead of using split archives, some posters may have used
WinRAR to split the file. You can recognize such files by the .RAR file extention.
Needless to say, split archives that can be automatically reassembled by QuickPar are much easier to use - so if you post to Usenet, please stop using RAR unless you're posting a collection of small files or if compression is actually useful - which is not the case with all fansubs!
Step 4 - Watch
Just use the
CCCP Project for this, if you haven't installed it already.
.