Originally Posted by Hutch

Well I personally hate torrents. They're unsafe, often slow, require upstream bandwidth and sites often operate a ludicrous metering system which quite frankly I cannot be arsed with. I mean, let's not even get into all the US and worldwide organisations that seed the torrent sites with duff uploads just to harvest IP addresses (blocked or otherwise). Newsgroups you get the same (or better) content, downloaded at the full speed of your connection and enjoy all the same facilities such as single-click downloads. Since the parts that make up the archives are simply ASCII text there's piss all to be monitored, the traffic's only one way (unlike torrents) so you aren't distributing (which is what most prosecutions have been based on) and my ISP and most Usenet sites do not even track headers, plus outside agencies have no access and even if they did it uses SSL encryption so you're ****ing invisible.

I use a program called SabNZB on my MacMini. I get free newsgroup access via my ISP (Internode) - if you don't get a free feed it costs about $10 a month for your own. Newsgroup downloads are tracked on sites like NZBMatrix and Newzbin. I have searches set up on those sites (piss easy to set up - just search and right click on the RSS icon in your URL bar and copy the link) which I have installed in SabNZB.

So every hour Sab goes and looks at the NZB sites, checks my RSS feeds for my shows and if it finds one, it adds it to a download queue. Then it downloads it (according to a totally configurable schedule), repairs any download errors, extracts it, renames it in an indexable way, copies it to my TV directory and sends me a message over the network to let me know it's there. I can connect to the central SabNZB server over the network or internet and monitor or cue up any downloads I want.

Every couple of weeks I have a good look on the TV and movie sites - see what's coming out (Sherlock on the Beeb, X Factor on ITV, Boardwalk Empire or whatever) and I add the search to Sab accordingly. It monitors everything, makes sure I don't download the same show twice and gets everything set up beautifully for use in Plex, Boxee, Front Row or XBMC.

So when I lower my arse onto that sofa in the evening to watch TV I get to see commercial-free stuff that I'm interested in. Since Plex and Boxee hook into the increasingly impressive array of online stuff (ABC iView, BBC iPlayer, YouTube or whatever) I hardly ever watch any broadcast TV at all.

Originally Posted by ozzieeagle

I've read on the XBMC forums that people are dowloading NZB files automatically as well. Now that IInet have lifted their medium plan to 400 gigs, then it makes sense to try and set up my copy of XBMC to do this.

Does anyone download from Channel 4 and 5 via VPN ?