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Tutorials - Binary Newsgroups

1. Introduction
2. Setup Newsbin
3. Download Files with Newsbin
4. Convert Downloaded Files
5. Music and Other Types of Files

3. Downloading Files with Newsbin

Now Newsbin is set up and sorted we want to use it to download files, the newsgroup we subscribed to previously "alt.binaries.multimedia.babylon5" has lots of episodes of Babylon 5 on it, I am using this for demonstration purposes you can find other groups and download whatever you want. Just remember anything you download is your responsibility both legally and morally and that although it is unlikely, your ISP can if they wish check anything you download because everything is stored on their servers. If you are really paranoid you can use a secure encrypted service in which case your ISP will not be able to tell what the files are even if they are interested in checking, they have better things to do mostly.

There are 2 stages to getting Binary Files, firstly finding and downloading the files you want, secondly converting the downloaded binaries to something your PC can use. The following process applies to any sort of binary file except only the larger files have PAR2 error restore attachments, MP3s and Software generally does not have these.

Downloading Binaries

1. Fire up Newsbin Pro, right click on the a.b.multimedia.babylon5 lable to highlight it then click "Download All Headers". When asked are you sure click "Yes". Newsbin will download all the headers in the alt.binaries.multimedia,babylon5 newsgroup. Next Double Click on the same a.b.multimedia.babylon5 lable you highlighted first and you will see the headers downloading. At the bottom of the screen on the left is a blue speed bar, when it stops all the headers are downloaded and ready to view.

2. So you should end up with the screen below; on the right in green are all the headers, currently they are a mess because they are displayed as they were downloaded, you need to sort them by subject so all the files are in order. Click once just above the green header display in the box named "Subject" , this will sort the files into order so they run sequentially by name.

3. You should now see all the headers listed earliest to latest as shown below. OK you are still confused so here is what you are looking at. The naming convention for a group is quite simple but it is in shorthand. Things marked ATTN are requests which can be ignored, the actual episodes of Bablyon 5 are listed as

B5S1E21-XviD-(00/30) - "B5S1E21 - The Quality of Mercy ********"yEnc - this translates as

B5 babylon5 S1E21 series1 episode 21 - Xvid this is the codec in this case a form of DivX Video (00/30) part 0 of 30 parts, you need all 30 to get the entire episode B5S1E21 repeat of series and episode number - Quality of Mercy Title of Episode. After this there are some different codes. nzb or nfo is an information file, par2 is the first Par file which restores missing and corrupt files after download and part01/02/03. rar are the actual video files. The rar bit is a winrar file which we will deal with later along with Par2 files. For now you need to download an episode, the episodes shown here may not be available but any episode will do. yEnc is just an protocol indicator for your news program (bit like http for web pages) ignore it.

4. To download the episode I have chosen for my example find the first header for the episode, this is the top one (00/30) Highlight it and scroll down till you find the last part (30/30) which will be a Par2 file. Hold down the shift key and click on the last par 2 file which will highlight all the parts of the Quality of Mercy Episode.

5. Right click in the blue highlighted area and click on "Add to Download List"

6. Newsbin will now download all the parts into the "newsbin" folder you set up in your My Documents Folder when setting up Newsbin. You can see the download working by the blue bar at the bottom or to monitor the actual files do this. Go to the bottom of the screen place the cursor over the bar indicated till it turns into the symbol shown, left click and hold then drag the bar upwards a bit. This episode will take a while to download, on my test it took 1 hr 15 minutes. When its finished shut down Newsbin and go to the next part of this tutorial.

3. Convert Downloaded Files >>>

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