Even compressed videos such as rar files which is the dominant format on Usenet these days can be viewed when the first rar files are downloaded to your hard drive. No need to wait to download the complete rar set to start watching the movie.

The video will be saved on the hard drive which means that you can watch the video again and do not need to download it again from the Usenet.

NZB Player uses so called nzb files, which contain the information about the location of the file on the Usenet, to show the videos. A rule of thumb is that you can only use nzb files that point to one video which means that you can’t use nzbs that contain a movie on two cds for instance.

It is however possible to use nzb search engines to split these and create two nzb files which would work fine with NZB Player. Uncompressed MPG files will not play as well while compressed ones work fine. NZB Player can play avi files, vcd and svcd movies and several other files.

I especially like the feature that it streams the movie while you are downloading it which is great for preview reasons. Great software.

Read More:

NZB Player Homepage

Pan Newsreader is offering a lot of features that commercial Usenet readers such as Newsbin are offering as well. It does support download binaries of course offering single-click encoding, multiple connections and simultaneous downloads and image previews of downloaded images.

I have to admit that Newsbin is not the perfect newsreader for reading and writing news. Pan seems to be able to handle this task better which is definitely a good thing. It does however lack a few essential features that I do not want to miss. The most important feature in my opinion is the SSL encryption.

As far as I can tell Pan does not offer SSL encryption which is a feature that I do not want to miss anymore. I’m not sure about nzb support but I could not get it to work either.

This leads to the following question. Which newsreader are you using ?