Q. What is Usenet?
I finally got sonarr and radarr working properly with qbittorrent, and prowler im curious what NZB is, I keep seeing nzbget, nzbhydra, sznzbd but i really dont know what it is or what it brings
can someone explain this to me and is it different from torrenting?
A:
Back before the world wide web existed (and the Internet itself was all shiny and new) a system called Usenet was created, in fact the first version of Usenet used UUCP rather than the TCP/IP network we now know as the Internet.
This was a text based messaging system similar to a forum (or even Reddit!)
Over the years people found ways to encode binary content (files) as text and post them to usenet.
Nowadays usenet is pretty much only used for this.
An NZB file is an XML document that describes the post IDs of files that make up content.
Generally you need 3 components.
1 or more indexers. These are services that index the contents of usenet constantly and categorise and sort the files on there, these then provide NZB files linking to the content. This usually requires a small yearly fee.
1 or more usenet providers. These are the services that actually carry the Usenet feed, they are what you connect to to download the content. This usually requires a larger fee but paid monthly.
A program like SabNZBD or NZBGet to read the NZB files from the indexer and download them from the usenet provider.
Once SabNZBd or NZBGet have got the file it’s the same as torrenting for all intents and purposes, except as Usenet is not peer to peer, there’s no need to seed.
Source: What is NZB
Q. Which is better nzbget or sabnzbd?
I think I saw somewhere its faster than torrenting, from your explanation would you see its an alternative to torrenting?
Your explanation was very helpful
A.
I exclusively use usenet. It’s far faster in my experience (on my gigabit connection I hit 110MB/s and it stays at that until the download is complete, to hit that on torrents I have to download multiple torrents at once) and you don’t need to seed. It’s also more secure in that you don’t announce your IP address to everyone else downloading that file. It is not peer to peer, what you download is between you and your usenet provider.
As to which is better, SabNZBD offers more features out of the box and is under active development but NZBGet performs better if you are running on a resource constrained platform (if you’re running on a NAS for instance).
This is because going back to how it’s all text posts, each of those text posts needs to be downloaded and decoded individually and then combined back into the file, this is resource intensive. NZBGet is written in C++ and is faster at doing this in places where your CPU isn’t as good, while SabNZBD written in Python may struggle.
NZBGet also has had no major updates in a year and the developer considers it a somewhat dormant project.
The main real downside is you have to pay. Indexers aren’t free and nor are usenet providers, and you usually want a couple of each.
Also, they have a nice wiki at /r/Usenet: https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki/faq/