How to work with binaries from Usenet newsgroups
There are many binary files you can find in the Usenet groups which can be
viewed and/or listened too, this includes MP3/OGG audio files, JPG/PNG/GIF
image files, and MPG/AVI/WMV video files.
Please note that many of these binary files contain copyrighted materials,
and downloading, combining, viewing or listening to them might be illegal
where you live.
Split files
Many binaries are large enough that they have to be split into multiple
parts in order to be posted and/or downloaded. In addition, because Usenet
is a text-only media, the binaries have to be converted into a text friendly
format, which makes the articles about 40-60% larger than the original file.
A "Parchive" is a parity file which posters can create for multi-part
binaries they post on Usenet. PAR files are used to re-create missing
parts from binaries. PARv1 used files that were the same size as the
original parts posted, and typically you need one parity file to fill each
hole (missing part) in your binary. PAR2 files sizes are not directly based
on the input file sizes, and par2 can be used to repair a large single file
that is corrupted or up to 32768 files can be handled. In addition a
damaged par2 file can still use the undamaged portions of the file to
perform repairs. Under Unix, the utilities for dealing with parity files is
typically named 'parchive' or 'par2'. Under windows a tool such as
Quickpar can be used to work with
the files.
RAR is the most commonly used multi-part file type used for posting binaries
on Usenet. RAR can compress and archive multiple files into a single large
RAR file or split the RAR into multiple parts for posting. This allows
posters to put videos, galleries of images or entire CDs of music into a
single multi-part archive which can be unpacked and has checksums and other
protections to make sure what you unpack is what they posted. Posters often
post PAR files with RAR files so you can replace any parts of the file which
are missing on your server. Under Unix you can use the
rar command to create RAR files, and
the
unrar commands to extract files
from a RAR file. Under windows you can use
Winrar (a commercial
program) to combine and use RAR files.
Some people use different programs to convert binary files to base64 format
and split them up into multiple parts, most of these will have the original
binaries file name with a sequence number appended
(ie. foo.avi.001, foo.avi.002,etc).
These can usually be combined by deleting anything outside of a begin..end
block in the article, and then concatenating all the files together and
decoding them. Under Unix you can use tools such as
uudx or
uulib to create or
unpack single or multi-part postings. Under windows you can use
HJSplit to re-create
binaries.
Informational Files
There are various files that posters might include to help readers and users
be able to locate all the pieces needed to get complete postings.
Posters will often create a posting with a filename ending in .000, .NFO or
.TXT which contains all of the files they posted as a set. These files
might contain checksums for files and/or message-id's the articles were
posted with. These files are usually human readable files and can be viewed
in your newsreader, or can be downloaded and viewed with 'less' or
'wordpad'.
files are an XML-based file format used for retrieving all parts of a
binary from your Usenet servers. The NZB format was originally created by
newzbin.com for their Usenet Indexing
service. NZB files contain the message-id's of the postings and can be used
to download all the parts from your NNTP server. Depending on the tool you
use, an NZB file can be used to download all parts of a posting without
having to know the subjects of the articles posted.
files are plain text files that typically contain the name, size and
checksum for all parts of a posting. This format creates a fairly small
file, but doesn't contain the message-id's for the postings. Since the file
format does not contain message-id's it is necessary to view the subjects
in your newsreader and download all the pieces manually.
© 2011 McCane Consulting