# nzb?



## mainsy (May 27, 2008)

Does anybody download using nzb? This has popped up on a few sites I look on so I0 did a google and it sounds great but I don't know where to start. I'm assuming its like torrents but more secure and a lot faster. I understand you need to pay for a server but I don't know who to go with, or if I am going to get ripped off.

Am I way behind the times or is it relatively new?


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## [email protected] (Jan 9, 2006)

.nzb is a newsgroup file extension, dont know a great deal about it, tried newzbin for a while and paying for sites where .nzbs are stored, just couldnt get on with them, guess i never had anyone who could show the right way to work with them


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## Bo2007 (Apr 3, 2007)

i use Astra Web for the server, Grabit for the client and Nezbin for the .nzb files. All you do is set up Astraweb or another server (there are loads available) use newzbin to search for the file you want and Grabit to get the files  dead easy!


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## mobileman (Aug 10, 2008)

Astraweb are doing a cracking deal for $96 for a whole years unlimited access, you wont find a deal any better at them min, if not used toi NZB i would recommend newsleecher as your client

I download approx 150 -200gb per month Wohoo


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## mainsy (May 27, 2008)

do you find it any better than bittorrent?


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## Guest (Jul 27, 2009)

you are confusing .nzb with usenet, .nzb is simply a file extension which tells your usenet client to download, you don't need ".nzb" to download from usenet

usenet = newsgroups


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## Bo2007 (Apr 3, 2007)

BT is ok but slow seeding and with NZB you download and not care about upload. i use Astraweb as they are a good offer with the $15 for like 100Gb or something silly.


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## mobileman (Aug 10, 2008)

mainsy said:


> do you find it any better than bittorrent?


NZB's much better IMO, none of this having to upload a tracker rubbish before you can download, aslo alot more secure using SSL than torrents.

Security on torrents is already coming into play from p2p file sharing and will get worse sooner rather than later


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## mainsy (May 27, 2008)

So what should i do to get going?
I've used google but its a minefield out there:doublesho


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## Guest (Jul 27, 2009)

Does your ISP provide usenet access? If so, give that a blast.

If not, you need to purchase some usenet access, AstraWeb one-off would be a good bet, as you are allocated xGB and can use it as you please, it never expires on a time basis. If you think usenet is for you, then consider getting a subscription. I use giganews.

You then need a usenet client (a newsreader), a good free one is grabit, but newsleecher is the best. You input your details into the newsreader client.

Then go to http://www.binsearch.info/ and search for what you want to download, create your NZB file, then open it with your newsreader, it will then download the files, voila. Set binsearch to the same retention of your usenet provider that you choose, astraweb is 340days or so.

The longer the rention of the usenet provider, the more stuff is available, for example if someone posted an album on usenet a 100 days ago, it would be available on astraweb, but not on your ISP usenet provider, as the retention wont be that much in all liklihood.

I think that has covered the basics, ask away if you have any more questions.


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## lami (Mar 19, 2006)

You need to get an account with something like giganews mate, choose the
package that suits you best and subscribe.

Once you have done this then you need a news client, I use newsleecher, its
dead easy to use, just either open the .nbz file from the web or save it first on
your computer then double click on it, and newsleecher opens and starts downloading
the headers in .rar format :thumb:

once downloaded you either use the inbuilt par checker or use the standalone
quickpar, once this has done if no repair is needed its just a case of clicking
on the first .rar file and letting winrar extract it into the chosen format, so films
and games are usually .iso's so these are best burnt with imgburn.


If there are parts missing when you quickpar it, then all you do is click on repair
wait a few minutes and it will rebuild the missing parts  once done its time
to extract with winrar as above :thumb:


I normally download @ anything from 700kb to just over a meg on a 8meg line.


You just need to check your ISP's small print on the package you use, as you might think
you are on unlimited, but most have a fair usage policy....go over this for a few months
and the will cap you in the evenings and weekends, so you could see your
download speed drop to 60kb :wall: :wall: :wall:


Orange have done this to me a while ago, so ive just got rid and are now changing.


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## mainsy (May 27, 2008)

right thats me up and running.
im using astraweb as a server and alt.binz as the client (was the only one i could get to work)

i'm on the fence here, i'm not seeing speeds faster then i get with bittorrent yet, also the speeds start stop a lot.

can you only download one item at a time?


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## Guest (Jul 28, 2009)

You can add more servers (simultaneous connections), astraweb allows upto 5 or something iirc. 

It may be possible your ISP is throttling the usenet and bittorrent, as usenet should in theory be full speed.


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## jamest (Apr 8, 2008)

With usenet you should get your max speed constantly.


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## mainsy (May 27, 2008)

speed goes up and down all the time, gonna give tiscali a bell


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## Guest (Jul 28, 2009)

oh you're with tiscali, why didn't you say so 

Unfortunately, if you want good usenet and torrent speeds, you will need to move ISP.

An example of tiscali traffic management:


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## Chris_R (Feb 3, 2008)

Absolutely, Tiscalli throttle the hell out of usenet, tried downloading using my newsgroup account at a friends and we got nothing out of it till about 11pm in the evening.


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## jamest (Apr 8, 2008)

Chris_R said:


> Absolutely, Tiscalli throttle the hell out of usenet, tried downloading using my newsgroup account at a friends and we got nothing out of it till about 11pm in the evening.


With Virgin you can max out at any time, but if you hit the low limits between certain hours you are down to 10-20% of you maximum speed anyway. Tiscali are pretty much just doing what Virgin should be doing rather than me calculating when I can start my downloads.


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## Chris_R (Feb 3, 2008)

jamest said:


> With Virgin you can max out at any time, but if you hit the low limits between certain hours you are down to 10-20% of you maximum speed anyway. Tiscali are pretty much just doing what Virgin should be doing rather than me calculating when I can start my downloads.


I don't get those issues with O2, they seem to be happy to let me download 24/7 without shaping of any type. 
I don't take the complete mick with it, I just spike it every so often. I do have the server up in the loft so I tend to queue a load of downloads and then go to bed.

Personally I use the client Ninan as it runs server side on my WHS box and I also made some contributions to the code scripts.. Greasemonkey script in Firefox adds an extra download link on any page with nzb files (Newzbin for example) which sends the download direct to the server. I have nothing on the laptop or Mac other than this script - no big disk usage etc. Very handy.


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## jamest (Apr 8, 2008)

Chris_R said:


> I don't get those issues with O2, they seem to be happy to let me download 24/7 without shaping of any type.
> I don't take the complete mick with it, I just spike it every so often. I do have the server up in the loft so I tend to queue a load of downloads and then go to bed.


The benefit with Virgin is you do get 20Mb however far you are from the exchange. If I was with Be, I could only get 1.5-2Mb.


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## Guest (Jul 29, 2009)

o2's network has plenty of free capacity at the moment, last I heard (about 3 months ago) it was totally free of traffic management equipment, very impressive for the price you pay.

That's not to say once it becomes more saturated they may look into it, but that could happen with any ISP.

About newsgroups, I remote desktop my server too and let that download the articles too, usenet leeching can take up quite a bit of CPU at high speeds.


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## ZedFour (May 6, 2008)

I was with Pipex and they started throttling Usenet at peak times (7-10pm) until a bunch of us complained and got it stopped.

Then they got bought by Tiscali and it's worse than ever!!!

Think I might move to O2 or similar although I can only get max 1Meg D/L at my house


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## mainsy (May 27, 2008)

:wall:

Just off the phone from Tiscali, oh my god.

They asked me to do a speed test which showed I was getting 2 mb/s download speed, but when I explained that I could not get good download speeds and had problems with bbc iplayer they started stuttering and when I said that I suspected I was getting throttled they blamed the phone socket filter.

Looking at my usenet client, it shows my downloads speed and it jumps from 20kb/s to 100 then down to 0 etc etc on a 2mb package what speeds should i expect to get using usenet?

tbh I'm getting better speeds with bittorrent, had over 300kb/s once.


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## Guest (Jul 29, 2009)

on usenet you should be getting what speed your line (or everything else) is capable of. Don't think phoning up tiscali will do anything because the traffic management is deployed customer wide and they will not, and most likely cannot, just remove it for you. It is a like it or lump it think i'm afraid.

Before this though I would try using newsleecher and add all the connections that astraweb allows, incase something else aside from the throttling is causing the problem.

What do your speedtest show: http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest.html
(copy and paste the results link)


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## Chris_R (Feb 3, 2008)

jamest said:


> The benefit with Virgin is you do get 20Mb however far you are from the exchange. If I was with Be, I could only get 1.5-2Mb.


Ah yes, I do forget that at times, I am lucky to be within enough distance to get 13-16 meg on LLU based products.


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## jamest (Apr 8, 2008)

Chris_R said:


> Ah yes, I do forget that at times, I am lucky to be within enough distance to get 13-16 meg on LLU based products.


If I could, I would switch to O2/Be.


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## mainsy (May 27, 2008)

this is my speed on think broadband
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results/id/124888786070039123822.html

and this is it on speedtest.net


massive difference between the two. hmm only pay for 2mb broadband so the second one is way wrong.

getting vexed now


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## Guest (Jul 29, 2009)

Could you tell me what Kbps news-europe gives you here: http://www.giganews.com/performance.html

speedtest.net is inaccurate, but lots of people dismiss that fact because it looks pretty 

Those speeds are too low, once I know what the giganews speedtest says to confirm, perhaps we can troubleshoot your connection.


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## mainsy (May 27, 2008)

G220 said:


> Could you tell me what Kbps news-europe gives you here: http://www.giganews.com/performance.html
> 
> speedtest.net is inaccurate, but lots of people dismiss that fact because it looks pretty
> 
> Those speeds are too low, once I know what the giganews speedtest says to confirm, perhaps we can troubleshoot your connection.


giganews shows only 395 kbps which is not good


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## jamest (Apr 8, 2008)

Giganews only shows mine as 15000kbps, but I know it is currently at 19,500kbps with downloads at 1,900-2,100 kBps.

Edit: Second run shows 16,500kbps, third shows 12,000kbps...


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## Guest (Jul 29, 2009)

the thinkbroadband speedtest is the most accurate out of them all, but it relies on java so sometimes worth to check another.

Well that is yet more proof that speedtest.net is a load of rubbish (for anyone reading )

Right, could you go into your router configuration and check the synchronisation speed?

This is the part where you type in the router IP into your web browser.


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## jamest (Apr 8, 2008)

G220 said:


> Well that is yet more proof that speedtest.net is a load of rubbish (for anyone reading )


Yet the most reliable for me.


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## mainsy (May 27, 2008)

G220 said:


> the thinkbroadband speedtest is the most accurate out of them all, but it relies on java so sometimes worth to check another.
> 
> Well that is yet more proof that speedtest.net is a load of rubbish (for anyone reading )
> 
> ...


is this it? DSL Speed: 448/7936kbps


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## Guest (Jul 29, 2009)

jamest said:


> Yet the most reliable for me.


I find that difficult to believe I have to say, the speedtest.net and giganews certainly does look attractive and "on par" (giganews probably an exception for you as it isn't very reliable past 8Mbps), but the thinkbroadband shows actually what is going on, it takes an average, whereas speedtest.net does some jiggery pokery.

Go and run them both after one another now and i'd be intrested to see what they both look like, i'd be amazed if the speedtest.net one was more accurate. Also remember the usenet programs will report slightly more and take a slight average, and won't show up momentary trophs which almost always occurs.


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## Guest (Jul 29, 2009)

mainsy said:


> is this it? DSL Speed: 448/7936kbps


That's it :thumb:

Can you go to http://speedtester.bt.com/

and fill in all the required details.... and then paste here your IP profile and other results (remember to edit out your phone number!)


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## jamest (Apr 8, 2008)

G220 said:


> I find that difficult to believe I have to say, the speedtest.net and giganews certainly does look attractive and "on par" (giganews probably an exception for you as it isn't very reliable past 8Mbps), but the thinkbroadband shows actually what is going on, it takes an average, whereas speedtest.net does some jiggery pokery.
> 
> Go and run them both after one another now and i'd be intrested to see what they both look like, i'd be amazed if the speedtest.net one was more accurate. Also remember the usenet programs will report slightly more and take a slight average, and won't show up momentary trophs which almost always occurs.




http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results/id/124889553234728426890.html

The speedtest.net one is more inline with what I get from usenet. Although there isn't much in it.


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## mainsy (May 27, 2008)

here's a cut and paste

Test1 comprises of Best Effort Test: -provides background information.
Your DSL connection rate: 7936 kbps(DOWN-STREAM), 448 kbps(UP-STREAM)
IP profile for your line is - 6500 kbps
Actual IP throughput achieved during the test was - 1760 kbps


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## Guest (Jul 29, 2009)

what usenet provider do you use? newsleecher does a 5 second average and also shows slightly above what you are getting (notice how the articles also get to 98% completed then jump to done). Not sure if that is sorted in v4 though.

I did use to think similar but the thinkbroadband is a true average, and not a momentary value. I think speedtester.net ignores the first few seconds, and has some other sort of element in. I know someone with a 1Mb connection and they can get silly things like 6Mbps on speedtester.net.

It's trivial though isn't it :thumb:


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## Guest (Jul 29, 2009)

mainsy said:


> here's a cut and paste
> 
> Test1 comprises of Best Effort Test: -provides background information.
> Your DSL connection rate: 7936 kbps(DOWN-STREAM), 448 kbps(UP-STREAM)
> ...


Strange.

Seems there may be exchange contention too, but ignoring that for the moment:

Try the speedtest a bit later on (say past 10 or so) and see what it says. To me that looks like tiscali are throttling you back quite heavily for some reason, including on speedtests.

Assuming the speedtest is still reporting the 0.3Mbps or whatever later on, I would phone tiscali support up tomorrow and tell them something like this:

"My line attenuation and noise margin is fine, I have swapped out my microfilter, I am synchronised at almost the highest speed for MaxDSL, nor does it drop out, therefore there is no problem with my line. I am experiencing no packetloss, further indicating my line is stable. I have run the BT speedtest and my IP/bRAS profile is reporting the correct figure, therefore it is not stuck. The BT speedtester while still slow, shows a result almost 6 times higher than what I get on the web, including speedtesters, indicating this is not a problem at my end, or even BT's end."

That often saves about 15 minutes of them trying to fob you off with either blaming BT or wasting your time.

Might be worth though before we go guns blazing with tiscali tech support to run a pathping to make sure you aren't getting any packetloss, can you go into command prompt (in accesories), and type

pathping www.google.com

then copy and paste the results here (on XP, to copy and paste, right click, press select all, then hit enter to copy, then paste -- In vista, right click and use select all, copy and paste accordingly).


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## mainsy (May 27, 2008)

Computing statistics for 300 seconds...
Source to Here This Node/Link
Hop RTT Lost/Sent = Pct Lost/Sent = Pct Address
0 main [***.***.***.*]
0/ 100 = 0% |
1 0ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% mygateway1.ar7 [***.***.***.*]
0/ 100 = 0% |
2 39ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% lo98.gr-acc-lns-1.as9105.net [212.
74.102.41]
0/ 100 = 0% |
3 --- 100/ 100 =100% 100/ 100 =100% 10.72.9.81
0/ 100 = 0% |
4 --- 100/ 100 =100% 100/ 100 =100% 10.72.9.223
0/ 100 = 0% |
5 42ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% xe-1-3-0.lon20.ip4.tinet.net [213.
200.79.181]
0/ 100 = 0% |
6 48ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% xe-1-0-0.ams10.ip4.tinet.net [89.1
49.186.241]
0/ 100 = 0% |
7 --- 100/ 100 =100% 100/ 100 =100% as15169.ip4.tinet.net [77.67.73.50
]
0/ 100 = 0% |
8 48ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% 209.85.251.12
0/ 100 = 0% |
9 50ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% 209.85.255.212
0/ 100 = 0% |
10 51ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% 209.85.252.83
0/ 100 = 0% |
11 55ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% 209.85.243.93
0/ 100 = 0% |
12 49ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% www.google.com [209.85.227.99]

Trace complete.

i think i have blanked out my ip address, let me know if i have left any sensitive info on there so i can edit :thumb:


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## Guest (Jul 29, 2009)

Yep IP blanked out. That's expected, no packetloss, try a speedtest a bit later on and if that is still poor give the tech support another bell tomorrow


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## mainsy (May 27, 2008)

phoned tonight after doing 3 speedtests all showing 0.3 Mbps, so was feeling a bit :devil:

got through to a nice chap called Yammut who started off with the usual questions about filters etc, so i stopped him and rattled of G220's techy stuff and stunned him into silence. he then put me on hold while he spoke to his boss.

about 3mins later he asked me to do another 3 speedtests so he could record the results.

once that was done he said he would file a report and someone would be back in touch within 48 hours :wall:


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## Guest (Jul 30, 2009)

Thats a result :thumb: Hopefully they can get this sorted now (or escalate to BT if it is an exchange problem)


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