Stream Videos from Usenet

When you normally download a video from the Usenet you do the following. You fire up your Newsreader, download the files, unpack them manually or have the client unpack them for you, and watch the movie in your favorite media  player.

NZB Player offers a different solution which is great especially for small nzb files that point to a video file directly. The player streams nzb files that you load into it from the Usenet directly which is nice for preview purposes and if you want to use a shortcut to view the video.

Even compressed videos such as rar files which is the dominant format on Usenet these days can be viewed as soon as the first rar file is downloaded to your hard drive. No need to wait to download the complete rar set to start watching the video which may be useful if you really want to watch a movie at the earliest possible moment.

The video will be saved on the hard drive which means that you can watch the video any time you want 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 stream 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, or multiple videos.

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.

Update: The player does not appear to have been updated in recent time. The copyright notice and history on the donwnload page on the development website indicates that the project seems to have been abandoned in 2008.

An alternative that you may want to take a look at is Binreader, another free program that supports the streaming of video files from the Usenet as well.

You need to add the server and your authentication information on start before you can use it. Once done, click on the add NZB button to add a file to the program that you want to watch. The program handles rar and par files, several popular video formats, and also encryption.

It lacks a couple of features that you may have come to expect from usenet clients though, like the option to support more than one server, for instance for filling or a speed limiter.