how ro download a file on giganews How to Download Using Usenet. wikiHow is a “wiki,” similar to Wikipedia, which means that many of our articles are co-written by multiple authors. To create this article, 16 people, some anonymous, worked to edit and improve it over time. The wikiHow Tech Team also followed the article's instructions and verified that they work. This article has been viewed 149,534 times. Just as we once debated between Blockbuster and Hollywood Video, we have many choices when it comes to downloading. One of the oldest and best downloading sites is Usenet. Usenet downloads from a single server, making it among the safest and fastest ways to download. It’s slightly more complicated than other options, and it does have a small price tag, but it’s worth it: Usenet has a wealth of media, it’s secure, and thanks to Usenet’s strict policies, the risk of piracy is low. The following article will guide you through the process downloading with Usenet and get you on your way to enjoying the vast Usenet community. So Your Download Is Incomplete? Alas, this is something every Usenet user goes through sometime in his career. You’ve found the file you were searching for, started downloading, and were already imagining watching the movie, listening to the piece of music or otherwise using it, and there it is, the whole, ugly truth: Your download is damaged beyond repair, no chance to do anything about it. Or is there? First, let us briefly explain what exactly happened here. When a file is uploaded into Usenet, it is split into tiny bits of data which themselves are encoded and posted as a piece of text onto the server. These small chunks then propagate through the network that is the Usenet and get downloaded by your newsreader, which then decodes the text, puts everything together and saves your file onto your computer. However if some reason one of these file chunks isn’t available on your newsserver, you’re in trouble. This problem has been known for a long time and thus, countermeasures have been delevoped – the par-files which are included by most uploaders in their releases. Par-files are repair blocks which can be used to fix the broken files. Since a majority of your downloads will have had incomplete files and you were still able to get it to your hard disk you can image how often these small errors occur. Now, if you use a modern newsreader chances are the software already tried to fetch every repair block there is and was unsuccessful. Just 2-3 blocks might be missing. Repair failed! You’re screwed. Why does this happen? Here’s a list of causes for this problem : Reason No.1 : Your Newsprovider Did A Mistake Known as the “completeness”, some providers are just worse than others with this. If you Google for your provider you might notice that a lot of rumors and opinions are out there. Some will claim that all services powered by the Highwinds group, such as Newshosting, UsenetServer and Easynews suffer greatly from this problem however most of the time everything will work out just fine. The provider with the best completion is reportedly Giganews and its resellers, but as you might know they’re quite expensive, so switching to them is not an option for everyone. Still, it might be worth a shot. Also Astraweb is said to provide better completeness, though far from perfect. Also it might be worth to have a look at the support section of your service. Maybe the problem is already known and they’re working on it or they might give you a workaround. Reason No.2 : A DMCA Takedown. Ouch! That is a though one. For whatever reason the copyright owner filed a claim against your provider and the files you were trying to get have been deleted partially or completely. This can go from deleting just the first RAR file to totally eleminating the binaries. We can only guess why this happened (you were not trying to download anything you’re not allowed to, right? Of course not, we all know this is evil and punished by the death sentence… ;)), but the truth is, this can happen with every single news service out there. Rumors state that some providers take these requests not as serious as others, but there is no reliable data on that. In any case, you need to either a) with another version of the file or b) try a different newsserver. Reason No.3 : The Files You Want Is Outside The Retention Of Your News Service (AKA To Old) After a certain period of time that varies from provider to provider, old files get deleted, as you most certainly already know. So if your download is too old or just getting past the threshold you might get huge parts missing and after a few days, everything will be gone. Some providers actually only provide retention “up to” a certain number of days which means some groups will have shorter binary retention than others. In this happens to you we urge you to, again, either find another version of the file or help you out with another provider which provides longer retention (see below). So, what can you do about it? Four possibilities: Possibility No.1 : Look For More Repair Blocks. Could it be that your newsreader has not tried to find more PAR-files? Clients such as SABnzbd+ do that automatically, however some don’t have this feature. Often this data is automatically added to your download when using a Usenet search engine, if not, you may try to locate other repair blocks and restart the whole download, giving your client another chance to get it right. Or do it manually so that you don’t have to download everything all over again, which may also be a good idea since possibly… Possibility No.2 : Your Newsreader Failed To Repair And Unpack The Files Correctly. Sometimes the automatic file processing most modern newsreaders do something wrong. It’s definitely worth a shot to check it manually. For this you need the free program Quickpar which you can get from https://www.quickpar.org.uk/ . Then locate the folder in which your client saves incomplete or failed downloads, find one of the PAR-files (anyone will do, simply doubleclick on one of them) and look if maybe you can repair the files. In case you downloaded more repair blocks following the last tip you need to copy them into the folder in which the archives are saved. The program is rather easy to use, so it shouldn’t cause problems. (QuickPar about to repair a file) Possibility No.3 : Find Another Version Of Your Download. This should not need any more explanation – Just head over to your favorite Usenet search engine and have a look. Possibility No.4 : Use A Different Usenet Provider / Get A “Backup” Usenet Account with them. This is what “professional” downloaders like to do. Instead of completely changing your news provider you can setup a secondary server in your newsreader. Most of them offer this option, for example Newsbin, Newsleecher, SABnzbd+, Unzbin. You don’t need another expensive monthly plan for this, a so called “block account” will do. These are accounts which provide you with a certain amount of GB that you can use whenever you want as the volume doesn’t expire. As soon as your client detects that a file is missing on your main server, the backup account kicks in and the data missing will be downloaded from there. Hint: Does your provider have more than one server, for example one for EU and one for the US? Then try setting up the one you don’t use as backup server. Maybe one of both servers is experiencing problems that the other one isn’t. Block accounts are easy to come by and relatively cheap. You might not need a very large package,we recommend you get yourself the smallest package available for testing if you’re unsure. Often recommended are Blocknews.net and Usenet-News.com. Setting this up is easy; we compiled a guide here: “How To Use Backup Servers” Good downloading and good luck! How do I get started with Giganews? Please note that you cannot access Usenet from a web browser . To access our service, you will need a newsreader , also referred to as a Usenet browser . Newsreaders are programs used to access Usenet like web browsers are used to access the World Wide Web. Mimo Usenet Browser + Search. Mimo Usenet Browser + Search is included free with every Giganews account. Mimo is a multi-platform Usenet Browser designed specifically for Giganews multi-year retention. Mimo is optimized for faster browsing and features integrated search and advanced image viewing. Get started in 60 seconds or less. Download Mimo » or Learn More » All members can choose between a variety of Usenet browsers. The following are either free or include a free trial period: SABnzbd : NZBs only, Mac/Linux/Windows, free (browser-based) : Windows : Windows : Mac : Windows : Mac : Linux, free. Connecting to Usenet. Once you have selected a newsreader, enter the following information: Server name: news.giganews.com Authentication: authentication is required Username: Giganews username Password: Giganews password Port: 563 or 443 with SSL enabled; 119, 23, or 80 with SSL disabled. Once you have entered the server information in your newsreader: Download the list of newsgroups Subscribe to the groups most interesting to you Download the article headers Select the articles you are interested in. Please keep in mind that every newsreader has unique features. Please see your Newsreader's website for further information specific to their product. If you need any further assistance, please contact our 24/7 Customer Success Team , who would be glad to assist. How to open and play PAR, RAR, .001 files from Usenet Newsgroups. Many files you find in the Usenet newsgroups can be played directly after you have downloaded them – like MP3 music files and JPG picture files. But larger files, like video, must be decoded and require extra drivers to run. We won’t go into the hairy details of how to use each program – we figure you’re smart enough to figure out most of this stuff , and nearly all the programs have tutorials on their web sites. Here is the 411 on what the extensions mean and where to find programs to use with them. File types that need re-assembly to use: RAR – Rar files are the most common multi-part file type. Look for filenames ending in .r01 to rxx. When selecting parts to download, look out for straggler .r00 or .rar parts – you need them all. Once you have downloaded all the RAR parts, use Winrar to combine them usable. . 001 – Some people use an different program to break large files into parts – you will see these as sequential extensions .001, .002 etc. Use HJSplit to recombine the parts. PAR / PAR2 files are “parity” files. These files are used to rebuild incomplete RAR or HJSplit file sequences when some of the needed files are missing. In fact, it is incredibly important to find a PAR file for .001 file sequences because HJSplit doesn’t check for data integrity when it combines the parts like RAR does. The program Quickpar can use the data in the PAR files check to completeness of the .001 or RAR files and fill in the holes in the other files. WIth PAR files you usually need ALL the PAR parts to rebuild one missing RAR or 00X file, but with PAR2 files you can try downloading just a few of the PAR2 files and see if Quickpar can rebuild it, and if not, keep downloading a few more PAR2 files until there is enough to rebuild everything. Automatic Re-assembly – Most newer Usenet Newsreader programs can automatically combine RAR and .001 files, and are even smart enough to automatically download extra PAR files and use those to rebuild damaged / missing file parts before combining the parts. Check out the Anchordudes Usenet Newsreader Reviews . Playable / Usable File Types: NZB files are unique to Usenet. They are actually XML file listings of individual Usenet articles that can be used to find articles on any Usenet server – not just the one they were uploaded on. They are created by the original poster, or can be created retroactively by other newsgroup members. When you find an NZB file, simply save it to your local computer and open it with your your newsreader program (most can automatically open them and start using them) to get all the articles. Check out the Anchordudes Usenet Newsreader Reviews. SFV files are checksum files that can be used to confirm that all the articles you have retrieved are unchanged from the way they were originally posted. Use hkSFV to read and create SFV files. NFO and TXT files are usually small text files with descriptions of the following files (or parts of files). Download the file and open it with a text editor like Notepad to read it. Note, some later versions of windows see NFO files as a type of registry file, so you must over-ride the file association to open it with a text editor. JPG, GIF, BMP, TIF are all picture files. There are tons of image viewer programs. One of our favorite free image viewing programs for Windows is Irfanview . MP3, WAV, WMA are all sound files. Most computers come with a music player pre-installed, but Windows users may also want to try out the free version of Winamp . We especially like the fadein / fadeout feature between songs (but then again, we’re easily amused.) MPG, AVI, WMV, MOV, VOB, MP4 are all video files. If you don’t like the movie player program that came with your computer, give these Windows based movie players a try. (available in 32bit and 64 bit versions – Free) (Great, full features multi-media player – Free) (neat feature lets you use the mouse wheel to scroll forward and back) ISO, BIN, CUE are all CD image files. You can use just about any CD burner software to make CD’s from them. If your CD or DVD burning program does not seem to recognize the file, try changing the extension to “.ISO” More Video file type info : Most video files require a “codec” in addition to the player program. Because it is an evolving standard, there are many codecs competing for dominance. Here is a rundown of the standards and some places to turn for help: MOV and MP4 are generally Apple Quicktime. You can get the codecs at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/ MPG files come in many flavors. If you have a DVD player and its software installed, you probably have everything you need already. If not, there is no easy way to run some of the higher quality MPG files, but the low quality version should run with standard video players. AVI files come in many, MANY flavors. The most popular codecs are: DIVX – http://www.divx.com/divx/ (look for the link to Standard Divx Player – free version) Xvid – http://www.xvid.org 3ivx – http://www.3ivx.com/download/index.html. One useful tool for figuring out what codec is needed to run a file is “ G-Spot “. Download it from: http://www.headbands.com/gspot. A couple good sites with additional video codec information are: Doom9.com http://www.doom9.org/ DVDRHelp.com http://www.dvdrhelp.com/play. Some video files are sent in 2 or 3 minute segments. To combine these segments into longer files you can use the following tools: How To: Download with Newsgroups. So you've built a nifty file server running Linux after following your favorite blogger's series of DIY 200 Dollar PC articles (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Now what? Wouldn't it be nice if you could turn that server into a speedy downloading machine? Take this scenario as an example: It's 8pm and you just got out of work from Google, Facebook or whatever your favorite "it" company is these days. You're waiting at the Caltrain station playing around with your iPhone until the train arrives to scuttle you back to San Francisco. You realize you forgot about something you wanted to download and send an email to your server from your iPhone. By the time you get home the download has finished and is waiting for you. That can be done and this article aims to get you hooked up with such a usenet service provider setup. For the purposes of this article, newsgroups and usenet are used pretty much interchangeably. Disclaimer: By writing this article I do not endorse, encourage or otherwise support piracy, nor can I be held liable in the event someone should follow this guide to pirate. Like BitTorrent, Usenet and newsgroups have legitimate uses. Newsgroups. Usenet. What is that? Unlike BitTorrent, a popular peer-2-peer communications protocol, interacting with newsgroups only requires downloading from a server rather than downloading from peers and uploading to peers. As such, downloading through newsgroups is typically extremely fast , given a proper Usenet service provider. Also, you are only connecting to your Usenet service provider — not any peers or other computers — making Usenet much more secure. Just to give you an idea of the speed, if you had a large queue of files to download over a typical 6 megabit Cable Internet connection, you would max out the line and exceed 2 Terabytes of bandwidth consumption in a single month. If you lived on a college campus with a fat pipe (assuming fat = 60+ Mbps), that number would be closer to 20 Terabytes. Of course, I doubt many people would realistically download 24/7 for an entire month. For example, try this newsgroup download speed test hosted by Giganews to see what kind of speeds you can get. Note that these would be the same as actual download speeds. Attaining a Usenet service provider. Binary retention is probably the most important thing to take note of when looking for a usenet service provider; it is the length of time files stay on their servers since the upload. The shorter the retention, the less of a chance you have of finding the files you're looking for. After checking out a handful of Usenet providers, I landed on Giganews, which offers an industry leading days of binary retention! I went with Giganews.com's Diamond account as I wanted an encrypted 256-bit SSL connection in addition to an unlimited account. Update 12- 26-2009: Giganews now has VPN service called VyprVPN bundled with their Diamond accounts that lets you encrypt all of your computer's web traffic. You'll need a client. Mac OS X - Panic's Unison (25). You can't really compete with this app for OS X. It won an Apple Design award and comes from the developers of Transmit and Coda. You can also use my Linux favorite hellanzb in OS X but installation is more involved with DarwinPorts. Update: Zach Inglis pointed me towards NZB Drop. Windows - GrabIt (free), NewsLeecher (20/yr), Android (27) Linux - I have tried many GUI-based newsreaders in Linux and they all fell short of my expectations. If you have any suggestions, please let me know in the comments, but I am very happy with the Python, command-line-based hellanzb. There is also URD (Usenet Resource Downloader) for those that need a GUI. I keep hearing about *.nzb files. What are they? The easiest way to think about nzb files is with this analogy: .torrent files are to BitTorrent as .nzb files are to Usenet. The files contain no actual files, only information about where and from whom to download the files. When going about downloading something with Usenet newsgroups, you typically want to look for and download the nzb file and then load that into your download client. Tweaking Hellanzb. SSH into your Linux box or work directly on it and install hellanzb and it's required parts. sudo apt-get install par2 rar hellanzb. Hellanzb needs python but you most likely already have that installed if you're using a distro like Ubuntu. Next up, you'll need to configure hellanzb. sudo vi /etc/hellanzb.conf. In the config file, you will need to go through and change the following items: host - For example, it would be news.giganews.com:119 for non-SSL, news.giganews.com:563 for SSL username & password for your Usenet service provider connections - The maximum simultaneous connections to your Usenet service provider's servers. This depends on your account and can range from something like 5 to 20 max simultaneous connections. If you're not sure, check with your provider. ssl - Set to "True" if your account supports SSL encryption, leave "False" otherwise. Hellanzb.PREFIX_DIR - Where you want the hellanzb directories to remain. I wanted them on my larger, secondary drive and I removed the dot from the hellanzb folder name so they would be visible when browsing from networked computers (OS X likes to hide .folders by default). Hellanzb.UNRAR_CMD = '/usr/bin/rar' Hellanzb.PAR2_CMD = '/usr/bin/par2' Hellanzb.SKIP_UNRAR - Set to False to have it automatically extract completed downloads. Hellanzb.NEWZBIN_USERNAME & Hellanzb.NEWZBIN_PASSWORD - Provide login info for your Newzbin.com account so hellanzb can automatically download NZB files given the NZBID. Don't forget to save and quit vim ( :wq ). Once hellanzb is installed and configured, you can start it up by simply running it. That is the standard way of running hellanzb. It gives you live download stats and monitors the queue (.hellanzb/nzb/daemon.queue) for new nzb files to download. Just drag a file in the queue directory to start a download. However, you must keep the command line open all the time or the process will quit. This is why I prefer running hellanzb as a daemon process: A daemon process runs in the background when working. It's always at your beck and call. Interacting with hellanzb as a daemon is a bit different. To get download stats, you must manually call them with the status option. You can cancel downloads with the cancel option and so on. Read the man page for more. Remote administration. Alternatives include utilizing a web UI such as hellahella but to be able to access the UI outside of my network I would have to open up ports on my router, potentially risk my network's security and all of that. Another option is opening up an SSH port on the router and then SSHing into the server to manage downloads. It's a powerful option but it brings with it the hassle of setting up DynDNS for a dynamic IP and forwarding the SSH port to the file server, which itself changes when devices become unplugged/plugged in the network and DHCP reassigns recently used IPs. In a nutshell, no thanks to all of that. Custom email to hellanzb python/bash scripts you say? Respect. After many hours wasted trying to work with various mail fetching scripts and not getting what I wanted, I enlisted the help of hacker extra- ordinaire Mike Wozniak. Mike is a computer engineering major at Georgia Tech that first got me into Linux when he lived down the hall my freshman year, but I digress. He came up with 2 scripts. Download the scripts here: hellanzb_scripts.zip (4kB) Place both scripts in /usr/bin/ . Edit hellagmail.py to include login credentials of the email account you wish to tie to your file server/download box. Look for the info around line 170. I highly recommend setting up an entirely new account only for this purpose. The file is named after Gmail as it makes use of POP3 SSL and the Gmail POP server. I believe it can be used with any email account by removing the _SSL part around line 111- 112 in the try block and changing the POP server URL. When selecting an email name for this, you must never share it or others might send it NZB IDs to download without your knowledge. As such, mine is more of a captcha than a real word. Also POP3 access must be enabled in the Gmail account. Save hellagmail.py when you're done and make it executable with the line below. sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/hellagmail.py. Do the same with hellascript.sh. sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/hellascript.sh. What do the scripts do? The bash script, hellascript.sh, checks to see if the hellanzb daemon is running and then queues the NZB IDs from the email using the enqueuenewzbin option. This will only work if you gave hellanzb access to your Newzbin.com account in the config file. Cron job'n it! Edit crontab with this line. Then give crontab the time information it needs as well as the path of the script to run. If it looks like that, you can go ahead and save. Fire up the hellanzb daemon ( hellanzb -D ), browse Newzbin.com, find a download you like and send the NZB ID in an email to your new email account. Within 5 minutes or less your computer should begin downloading the files after looking up the NZB ID on Newzbin.com and downloading the nzb file. When the download is done, hellanzb will check the parity of the files with par2, repairing as necessary, and then unrar the files (as per the settings in /etc/hellanzb.conf). Thoughts. Paul Stamatiou is a designer, developer and photographer living in New York. He has been a product designer at Twitter since 2013. More »