Today we will look at setting up NZBget on your Premium Seedbox. Speaking from experience, I've had immense success in terms of achieving great download speeds by switching from torrents to Usenet.
Take a look 🤯
This is just one example of how well your seedbox can handle Downloading from a Usenet News Server 🙂
Let's dive into NZBGet and get to know our new Usenet Downloader!
What is NZBGet you ask?
NZBGet is a Usenet client written in C++ and designed with performance in mind to achieve maximum download speed by using very few system resources.
Download & Install:
To install NZBget on our Premium Seedboxes, we’ll head to our Client Area >> One Click Installers >> Torrent Utilities >> NZBGet >> **Click Gear Icon To Begin Installation**
**Please that you can also use install-app via CLI to install and uninstall One Click Installers on your seedbox.
Read, Set, SET-UP!
After installation, return to the list of INSTALLED One-Click Installers and hit the refresh button.
After you have refreshed your list of currently installed applications, it’s time to log in using the URL provided by clicking on the key icon.
Your URL should look like this: https://x-x-x-x.a.seedbox.vip/nzbget
**Double Click on PASSWORD to copy it to your clipboard!
Welcome to NZBget!
Here we’re greeted with the default NZBget layout. Feel free to take a quick look around before we begin! When you’re ready, click the Settings button to move on to the next step.
Settings and configurations:
Configuring News-Server:
You will need to have previously subscribed to a Usenet New Server to download NZBs effectively. For this tutorial, we will use News Hosting. We will cover the most relevant settings to get you going!
Host: URL provided by News Server subscriber.
Port: 563 is a secure port. It is highly recommended that you keep your data and activity secure by using a secure connection to your Usenet server.
Username: The username used or provided by News Server
Password: Passwords can be set or provided by your News Server
Encryption: We are using secure port 563, so we will need to enable this
Cipher: I’ve chosen to use AES256-SHA in this example. You can leave this blank to use the default cipher or choose your own. You can look see HERE for more information on choosing a cipher.
Connections: Setting this to the maximum number of connections may increase the initial speed of each download but creates more overhead. It's recommended that you start with a lower number (15) and go up by intervals of 5 until you reach a top speed with little fluctuation.
Scroll to the bottom hit save, and reload NZBGet!
Setting Download Paths:
Our next stop will be PATHS
By default, NZBGet creates its main directory within the home users' ~/downloads folder. **This is not to be confused by ~/Downloads.**
You can change these settings if you’d like, but I recommend leaving them and instead using the Categories section to sort finished downloads.
Now you can set different categories based on your own criteria. Here we will use Radarr as an example:
We’ve set the name to Radarr and told NZBGet to put downloads under this category directly in the /home/user/plex/movies folder.
You shouldn’t need to mess around too much with the rest of these settings unless you have to.
Scroll to the bottom hit save, and reload NZBGet!
Speeding Things Along!
There are a few ways we can ensure that NZBGet works in a fast, efficient way. One of the most suggested ways, however, involved using separate physical hard drives for both the intermediate download location and the final destination path, which is not possible using a seedbox. This doesn't limit us from experiencing blazing fast download speeds, and exceptional unrar performance using C++.
Article cache
Article cache greatly decreases file fragmentation, which improves the unpacking speed. This is especially important if you use many connections (10 or more). If option DirectWrite is active the article cache can be set to 200 (MB). If DirectWrite is disabled, the article cache should be big enough to accommodate any whole rar-file (up to 1 GB).
Direct Write
The files are posted to Usenet within articles. One rar-file may consist of hundreds of articles. To combine the articles into the destination file, the downloaded articles must be saved temporarily until all articles for the file are downloaded. The downloaded articles are saved to memory (if the article cache is active) or to temporary files. The latter would drastically decrease the performance because the written temporary files need to be read again and written into the destination file. NZBGet uses a special technique to avoid the creation of temporary files completely. It is called Direct Write. When the option DirectWrite is active, the program writes each article directly into the destination file to the location where the article belongs to. However, this works only if the destination file with the required size can be created upfront, which requires the support of sparse files. Most modern filesystems (including NTFS on Windows and EXT3, EXT4 on Linux) support it, with a notable exception being HFS+ on Mac. If the direct write can not be used due to a lack of sparse file support, a large article cache must be configured for the best performance.
Write Buffer
If you have a lot of RAM, set this to 1024. If you have little memory, set it to 32 or something or more, depending on the number of connections. The WriteBuffer is especially important if the article cache is disabled.
Scroll to the bottom hit save, and reload NZBGet!
Check and Repair & Par Quick
These are some additional settings that allow for an efficient Usenet experience.
(PARity file) A file that contains the computed parity bits from a source file. PAR files are generated from Usenet archives that have been broken into multiple files because of file size limitations on news servers. A PAR file would allow the complete archive to be reconstructed if one of the files became corrupt.
Scroll to the bottom hit save, and reload NZBGet!
Unpack
Ensure that these settings are also set to YES to ensure your NZBGet experience is as smooth as possible.
Scroll to the bottom hit save, and reload NZBGet!
Wrapping up...
Now you're ready to add your first NZB and start downloading! You can use NZBGet in tandem with other applications like Sonarr and Radarr, and you also have to option to save RSS feeds for a more automated experience.
If you'd like more information about performance tips or additional setting custom configuration tips please visit the official NZBGet WEBSITE
I don't know what to do next...
If you need any assistance, let us know by opening a chat in the bottom-right corner of your screen. We're here to help 😄