NZB clients

Freedom
Linux
Author

Vinh Nguyen

Published

September 4, 2011

Usenet is an age-old medium for sharing and exchanging knowledge and ideas. The creation of NZB files has facilitated the exchange of binary files such as documents from political dissedents over the age-old protocol (NNTP).

SABnzbd is a great all around solution that monitors a directory for nzb files, emails the owner progress updates, and post-processes the downloaded files. It also has an easy to use web interface. I would use it on some kind of a server. On Debian or Ubuntu, the authors advise using the PPA for a more up-to-date version. NZBAir - SABNzb & Usenet NZB is an Android app (not free) that facilitates the control SABnzbd.

Hellanzb is a great alternative to SABnzbd, although its development has halted (authors feel it is solid as is and will only commit to bug fixes).

I like nzbget because I can use it on the command line like wget. It is suitable for a day-to-day machine like a laptop. On Debian/Ubuntu, compile nzbget from SVN source. Set up the newsgroup and local directory configurations at ~/.nzbget (use the example config). I also place the post-processing script at ~/.nzbget-postprocess.sh (set PostProcess=~/.nzbget-postprocess.sh in ~/.nzbget) and its configuration at ~/.nzbget-postprocess (set SCRIPT_CONFIG_FILE".nzbget-postprocess.conf"= in ~/nzbget-postprocess.sh). Then I can download via the command nzbget file.nzb and files will be downloaded and post-processed in the directories I specified in the config file.