Usenet-o-matic for your mobile
"Usenet indexer Newzbin has lost its MPA court case."
Maybe that doesn't ring a bell but anyone who's been digging into to "downloading stuff from the net" will soon find out that Usenet is the place where it's at: your one stop shop for all the movies, TV shows, music and apps you can chew.
The only problem: it's too much and as is the case with the torrent trackers - Usenet is also flooded with crap: virus infested apps, password protected files, DRM loaded pay-movies,...
Not very easy to find the good stuff.
That's where Newzbin came in: their system of user-generated and verified reports made it a no-brainer to find clean and high quality releases - nicely packaged in so called nzb files,which are a list of all the binary chunks you need to download from a Usenet server in order to rebuild the files you want.
AND they have a very nice API for developers like me so they can script and automate their download flow.
Not anymore: starting from March 31, no new reports are being added. The service is not broken, but without updates it's pretty darn useless.
So there i was: sitting in my bathtub, sipping my red wine and hitting the play button, only to find the latest episode of Lost wasn't there.
No fun!
Especially since I was not in the position to jump up, run to the keyboard and quickly find another source.
As these things go, it's a classic case of "the King is dead, long live the King".
NZB sites are not hard to find and I quickly updated my scripts to use NZBMAtrix as an alternate source.
One of those scripts is a mobile optimised search tool to quickly find a TV-show (or whatever it is you're looking for) and tell your homePC to download it.
The idea is that you use your mobile phone to initiate a download, your homePC downloads the file using a fast internet connection and streams it back to your mobile phone. Very easy and very fast: e.g. downloading a TV episode takes a minute or 2 after which you can use Relocally - or something like Air Video - to stream it to your device.
The script is called Usenet-o-matic. It will be part of Relocally, but if you want you can use it yourself.
It's available at http://usenetomatic.codeplex.com.
In this first release it supports Newzbin and NZBmatrix as index sources and SABnzbd as download server.
This means that in order to get it working, you need a Newzbin premium account or a NZBmatrix VIP account and a SABnzbd installation. (and a decent Usenet provider obviously - like Giganews)
I admit: those are a lot of things to set up (and are not free) so probably the target group of a script like this is pretty narrow, but once you get everything inline, download Walhalla is yours :-)
Sorry, no live demo but here are some screenshots: (Yeah yeah, I know: it looks like crap, I left the design part for you to add :-) )
