Downloading free Usenet files

The manual method

Getting your free Usenet files manually can seem overwhelming at first, but with practice it gets easier. To access the information in the Newsgroups, there are two things you will need:

News server subscription

There is no way around this if you want Newsgroup access, and there are plenty to choose from, free and paid. You may be lucky enough to have free Usenet access through your ISP (contact your ISP support to find out), in which case you will not need to subscribe to a third party.

 

Newsreader (Newsgroup reader)

Newsreaders connect your computer to your News Server, and are very similar to P2P clients in their appearance and function. Check out these popular examples which are free.

What's next?

When you run the Newsreader, it connects to the News Server and displays a list of the Newsgroups you now have access to. You then highlight which Newsgroups you are interested in and retrieve their message 'Headers'.

Headers are the brief 'title and description' of what each message currently posted on the Newsgroup contains, and are the starting point in deciding which ones to download in full.

To find the Archives for movies or any other large media files, you'll need to search in the binary Newsgroups, which usually have names that begin with ‘alt.binaries’, so they are very easy to spot. Once you have selected all the Headers you need, the News Reader will download their accompanying text messages (the Parts of the Archive) and decode them back into binary files.

Finding all the files

So how do you locate and assemble all the Parts associated with a particular Archive? Well, an essential component of any new binary Archive posting is the 'nfo' file, a small text based information file with the .nfo extension which can be opened with any text editor such as notepad.

By identifying the Header for this file, and downloading it first, you can read all the important information about the Archive. You will be able to find out how many Parts it has, its total size, codec requirements, release notes and any other important details. Once all the Parts have been found and downloaded, the entire Archive can then be converted back into the original movie file etc.

Don't be put off

Manually locating all the Parts of an entire Archive can take a while, but downloading free Usenet files this way can be very rewarding for the true Usenet enthusiast. After a couple of goes you'll have it sussed, and then you'll be flying.

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Downloading free Usenet files (Top)