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Better ways to download legal material you already own.

by Calvin Robinson on November 11, 2008.

Okay that title’s a little long, but I thought “better ways to pirate” might get the wrong attention.

I think Bram Cohen is a genious, but I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Bittorrent. In that, I love that it brings me my downloads, but I hate how slow it does it.

Everyone is always “oh you need to tweek it” and “it’s your ports”. Lol, I’m no newbie. I’ve opened the correct ports, tweeked the correct settings, and come to the conclusion: You can only download bittorrents fast, if you use private trackers.
I get banned from private trackers, because I download far too quick, and don’t get time to re-seed as much as I download. That’s due to me having a crazy download speed, with a shitty upload speed – gotta love that UK Broadband industry con.

So I found an alternative.
Years ago I used to download wares over Usenet. But I stopped it was so messy. As far as I knew, there was no index for you to search, you just had to browse the different binary groups and look for things you liked. Then download all the the posts with that software name. There were a few half-decent Newsgroup readers, that would look for softwarename.par01 and download them all – but it was all so clumsy.

Okay I might be a newb, because I’ve only just discovered NZBs.
An NZB file is a lovely XML-based script file that does all the work for you. You go to an NZB indexing site, search for the software you want to download, then import the NZB into your downloading software.
The NZB contains all the information it needs to grab all those pars/rar, including the newsgroup servers etc.
You don’t even need to look at an alt.binaries. It does all that.

I use a program called hellanzb, for Ubuntu. I leave it running in the background, then when I drop a .nzb file into the Queue folder, it begins downloading, just like a torrent would, only with speed.

To give you some perspective, I download films in under an hour, and it took me under 2 hours to download Gears of War 2 (to try it, before I purchased it)!

.NZB is the new .Torrent in my house.

November 11, 2008
Tech
3 Comments
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  • http://launchpad.net/~gamerchick02 Amy

    I use torrenting software to get linux distros to try out, but I don't pirate games/music/movies.

    Why?

    Well, for one, I'm working now. I did get music off of the network at school to try it out, and I ended up expanding what I liked that way. And, of course, that added to my music collection because I would usually buy what I found on the network (I like having a physical piece of media). This helped the music industry because I ended up buying the CD. :)

    For another, I think that the people who produce the content should be paid. This does not mean I support bad content. Ie, if I want to try out a game, I will probably either borrow it or see if I can find a free online trial or something. I'm not going to pay for something that is utter crap, if you know what I mean. BTW, I haven't bought a computer game since SimCity4. I purchase mostly DS and Wii games now.

    Software is another matter entirely. I try to use free and open-source as much as I can, but I will tell you that the copy of Office 07 I have is the same one my brother got off of the Microsoft student site. So, it was free, but I would probably pay for it now, if it was reasonable. Ie, not several hundred dollars.

    I agree with you about pirating… why should I pay for something that has the potential to be crappy? But, I'll often find a gem in the proverbial pile of junk. I've found that sometimes just trying out something on a whim (even though it's a $10 whim) you can find something that's really good. I've found some really neat music that way.

    I guess my pirating doesn't save me any money… I'll try the CD out from a friend (ie, get a copy) then end up buying it anyway… the burned version goes in my car!

    Amy

  • AI

    Ok, so you don't pirate. how the [blank] does that contribute to his article!? I don't know you, but I sure as hell don't care that you don't pirate.

  • AI

    if you know anyone who has an account here: http://www.newzbin.com/ you could do the same thing without actually downloading anything to start with.

    You just search by the name of what you are looking for and it displays all the info relating to that, and ur done. – just click to download what you want.



  • calvin

    Calvin

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