XSLYNX

Many years ago before the internet there were networks of BBS criss crossing the globe. Well sort of. These were Bulletin Board Systems for people to hang out, discuss any given topic without fear of being moderated, as some of these BBS were privately owned. It was initially text based. Since then the web has grown and so have BBS systems, turning into what we know today as newsgroups. So now instead of posting a little bit of text saying “YEah I thinkk MetallicA are cool \\m//” etc . . people realised that they could post files. This soon caught on and newsgroup servers began popping up everywhere, with large and bigger storage space to save these files that were being posted. Now you can find the latest screener of a film that has been ripped from DVD to an avi and has been packed up into 15mb files and posted on these newsgroups. There are newsgroups dotted all around the world, and when scheduled, these newsgroups replicate with other newsgroup servers. Pulling new articles and files to their server, and sending new files and articles that have been posed on it’s server. Sometimes when this replication takes place the files become corrupted. So some servers have 100% of the posted files whilst others do not. That’s why sometimes you will see articles with some PAR or PAR2 files associated with them. This calls for a screenshot:

Working from the top down, the first section marked out in red shows that Doom has been posted. It’s a DVD rip encoded using the xvid codec. These have been posted as .rar files. Next are the PAR files that were mentioned earlier. It’s best to download the smallest PAR file then launch that in the same folder as your other files of the same ilk, and it will check the other files for corruption. If you have unlimited bandwidth download all of the PAR files. The about of blocks in the PAR file available to recover a corrupt file is shown after the “+” in the filename.

Example:
(3664)-(#altbin@EFNet)-(FULL)-(Doom.Unrated.PROPER.DVDRiP.XViD-DEiTY)-(60/66) – “doom.dvdrip.xvid-deity.vol041+36.PAR2″ yEnc

In this instance, in the bottom outlined section, the poster of this film has included a sample which can be downloaded first to check for quality, and subtitles files (if needed) which are in the .sub and .ibx format. The .idx format is compatible with most home MPEG-4 players and will display the subtitles when the .avi is played.

Below are the configuration settings for my installation of GrabIt.

Error handling

Should you suddenly lose power to your computer, the network fails or your computer is switched of when decoding, sometimes articles may become corrupt. Quickpar may not be able to fix these, so GrabIt will retry the articles that have failed in a previous session.

Batch

Information update frequency is just the green bars on the Batch tab indicating data being downloaded. It looks fancy if they are on but it’s not necessary. The higher the decode priority the more CPU and memory GrabIt is going to use. The higher the download priority the slower the web browsing. Auto save batch is a good thing. You’ve just added hundreds of articles spanning many groups, and GrabIt crashes, losing your queue of articles! Don’t worry, GrabIt has saved your batch from as close as a minute ago.
I’m not too sure what yENC encoding is, but when articles without attachments are saved as text, you can sometimes convert them to the .rar file. Which has somehing to do with yENC. I think.

Folders

Err, just set it to what is configured on the left.

GrabIt Search

Finding what you are looking for on newsgroups is tricky. Where do you begin to look? NTL have over 29,000 groups! You can either browse through the suggested groups (see image at the bottom) or you sign up for search access with Shemes. Problem is, that service searches all of the Usenet (all newsgroup servers) and NTL don’t have all of those groups available. Try www.newszbin.com, you can sign up for a free account, and then edit preferences to include the groups that you are interested in, then newszbin will mail you what files have been posted on those groups every day. This is where you will enter in your GrabIt search information allowing you to search more than the 5 free searches you are given every day.

History

Grabit handles a lot of articles quite well. 1,000,000 is all you really need. You can check a groups article count from the All Groups tab.
NTL keeps articles no older than 18 days. I have GrabIt set to 21 days as I sometimes use UsenetServer
to search for files on groups that NTL does not have. UsenetServer has a retention of about 30+ days. And many of the more popular groups alt.binaries.dvd, alt.binaries.hdtv, alt.binaries.multimedia, alt.binaries.mac.applications are available through Usenet.

Interface

Posting

You don’t post. You leech