I’m in my first month of Usenet. I own several popular BluRay Movies but thought I’d save time ripping them manually and instead see what I could get off Usenet (NZBGeek + Eweka) now that my niece is visiting and needs entertainment.
I noticed a number of popular titles are consistently difficult to obtain (“aborted, cannot be completed”), even when live within only a few days, or even hours.
I assume this is a very vigilant DMCA takedown bot. How commonplace is this? And why does it only apply to some titles and not others?
Is it worth continuing with Usenet? I thought paying for content would ensure a certain “quality” of experience. So far, I’m a bit disappointed.
Usenet, while way better than torrenting, still requires multiple indexers and providers for this reason. I have 3 of each and rarely ever run into this issue except for very niche releases.
I’m inexperienced with Usenet, but why is it better than torrenting?
I have 5-6 trackers which provides me basically everything I need and it sounds like Usenet might be similar in that regard.
The main benefit is that you don’t need to use a VPN, so you get full download speeds. Also the availability and download speed isn’t dependent on seeders, so more obscure content tends to survive longer on Usenet.
That’s interesting about the life time. I’ve actually heard the opposite, where niche/old things can be easier to get from specific trackers vs Usenet because of their lack of popularity.
I suppose it’s probably mostly about which websites you are a part of and if they specialize in specific content.
Which three providers/backbones dyou have?
For indexers, I have DrunkenSlug, nzbgeek, and nzbplanet. My backbone providers are UsenetExpress, FrugalUsenet, and Giganews. You can use https://whatsmyuse.net to make sure you don’t have overlapping backbones.
Haven’t had any experience with eweka, but this is the reason why people tend to have multiple providers from different backbones and multiple indexers - to increase your chance for completion. Weirdly, eweka does not follow DMCA, but NTD which I’ve seen regarded as slower to take down content, so in theory the experience should be better, especially on fresh content.
Your mileage will vary greatly depending on what indexers/providers you pick and unfortunately it’s very difficult to say whether it will reach your expectations until you try different options.
If you’re willing to spend some more on it, you could try just looking for a small and cheap block account from a different backbone to see if it helps with the missing articles, but there are no guarantees.
Isn’t usenet paid?
I tried once exploring it but found out have to pay my ISP or something, so went back to torrenting.
Man I remember 20 years ago, Usenet came included as part of my Internet service. Grabbing stuff was so much simpler back then.
