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This is part four in a home theatre article series I’m calling Cutting the Useless Cable. This article will cover Newsreaders.
See Part I here.
See Part II here.
See Part III here.
See Part IV here.
So things are slowly coming together. We've got your home theatre machines all setup. Now its time for the rubber to meet the road for some good ole
piracy legal downloading. So far, we have a Usenet server to download things and a place to get NZB files. Now we need the tool that is actually going to do the downloading to your home server.
There are a few ways to get those downloads started. One is to install an actual application like Grabit on your computer. I hate that way, so we won't be covering it. There are a couple of web based Usenet hosts that allow you to upload NZB files. Meh. The best way involves installing a web based tool on your home server. Now this way I like because who can't use a web browser? Easy peasy. And you get to control the process and even setup some additional automation!
The tool we'll be discussing today is called SABNZBD+ (
http://sabnzbd.org/). What a horrible name. However the (free) product they provide is amazing. Hopefully, you're running some sort of Linux based home server at this point. Even if you aren't, SAB (as it is more easily known) will run on Windows.
As the Swiss army knife of newsreaders, there are a couple of ways to instruct it to grab things that you want. There are even ways to make it automatically grabs shows and movies that you want. Those instructions are coming up in another juicy article. What we'll be discussing today is you presenting SAB with an .NZB file that you have found on
http://www.nzbmatrix.com or whatever NZB hosting site that you're using. We'll also cover a neat way to have SAB download something you want when you aren't at home.
First. you'll need to download and run the setup for SAB. It is a pretty straight forward process and includes a wizard to pull all the necessary information out of ya. You'll need to know things like your ID and password for your Usenet server, so make sure that is still handy. We're not going to dive into the setup step-by-step as its pretty straight forward. However, if you need something like that, the SAB wiki has it all spelled out here (
http://wiki.sabnzbd.org/quick-setup).
* waits for you to get it installed *
Okay, let's move on and download the actual file that the (totally, free, legal, and not pirated) NZB file you have points to. I've found the easiest way to do that is to take advantage of what SAB calls a 'watched folder'. This is a folder that SAB scans every few seconds to see if there are any .NZB files in it. If there are, it pulls them into SAB and begins the process of downloading (and then extracting) the file(s). So pick a folder on your home server, fire up a web browser pointed to
http://SERVERNAME:8080, hit the 'configure' option, then the 'folders' option, and add the path to the 'watched folder' field. SAB is wonderfully documented, so if you need more information about this feature it can be found here (
http://wiki.sabnzbd.org/configure-folders-0-7). Now drop an .NZB file into that directory and watch it disappear! SAB sees the file, pulls it in, and then deletes the .NZB itself. *poof* You're now downloading from Usenet.
It's all setup, but I've got an extra trick for you that makes all this even easier. Ever heard of the service called Dropbox? It's a free, simple file synchronization service. Sign up here (
http://db.tt/ClRsdm4 - if you use this link I get an extra 500MB for free, thanks). Install the Dropbox client on every machine that you own, including your home server. Now any file you put in your Dropbox folder on your machine will appear on every machine you installed Dropbox. See where I'm going with this? Point the SAB 'watched folder' feature to your Dropbox folder! Then its easy to add an .NZB from anywhere in the world using either the Dropbox client or even signing into their website and uploading a file from there.
The automation is slowly getting better, but we aren't done! Well, we are for today though.
Please post any comments, suggestions, or questions.
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