it’s K-Rad y0!   Starting from scratch

This is another popular post that was lost in the Great Hard Drive Crash of 2008. I was explaining to John that Newgroups are far superior to Torrents, but it is slightly more complicated to use. So I decided to repost my guide from 2007.

I have been asked a few times now, how I keep up with TV while living in Hong Kong. Anyone who has been outside Canada or USA realizes quickly that TV just sucks in other countries. I’m not complaining, because these places usually offer a lot of other things to do instead. But there is plenty of good programming on TV right now, and it would be a shame to miss out on it all.

The quick answer is “use the internet”. That’s an obvious solution, but you just have to know where to look. I am going to write a series of posts describing how you can watch TV using your internet connection, whether it is HDTV from the big networks, overseas programming from other countries with good TV, like some shows in the UK, and Pay-Per-Views and hockey games that otherwise would be impossible to watch.

The Basics

At the very basic, you need the following:

1. A good internet connection
2. A good news provider
3. A NZB reader
4. A Bit Torrent client
5. Software & codecs

The first thing you need is a GOOD internet connection. You may be able to hijack someone’s unprotected Wifi connection to check your email, but you’re going to be downloading thousands of gigs of data if you plan to use the net to provide all of your TV. You will want to sign up with an ISP that has a fast connection, and no limits on bandwidth. I use Netvigator in Hong Kong. For $224 HKD a month ($32 CAD), I get a 30 Mbps connection with absolutely no bandwidth limits, downstream or up. Next, you will need a good news provider. This is where you will be downloading most of the content. Bit Torrent is another option, but bandwidth is an issue for most people, so TV shows on torrent networks are released at a lower quality bit rate. A typical 42 minute show (1 hour minus commercials) is about 350 MB as an HDTV XviD release on Bit Torrent. On newsgroups, you’ll find the same shows encoded as high-resolution XviD files which are 700 MB. Some shows are released as very high res files, using higher quality bit rates and the x.264 codec. These are about 1.2 GB per “one hour” show.

The newsgroup provider I use is Giganews. For $25 USD a month, you get unlimited data transfer, and a very fast, reliable connection with (soon to be) 365 day retention (meaning you can download shows that were posted as long as 1 year prior). The price may seem steep, but consider that I have transferred over 7000 GB of data since April 2006, all at the full 6 mbps (now 30 mbps) my ISP provides, and you’ll quickly see it’s worth it. There are some free servers out there with a couple days retention, but you’re on your own there. And don’t even think about using your ISP’s newsgroup server, they barely even keep binary files at all. If you decide to sign up for Giganews, please use my referral link. I’ll get credited $15, which I hope is fair for writing this guide.

Next, you’ll need the client to use to download the data off the newsgroups. For that, I use Newsbin Pro. For $35 (If you subscribe to Giganews, you can get an exclusive Giganews version for $25) you get a robust reader that fully utilizes all the available bandwidth, and makes it easy to find the binary files you’re looking for. An alternative is NewsLeecher, which is also good, but I simply decided to use Newsbin Pro after testing them both out. When you add your server info, make sure to set it to use 20 connections  – this is how you will be able to max out your downstream bandwidth (Giganews has increased this limit to 20 connections, guaranteeing full bandwidth saturation).

There are two ways to go about finding your programming. One is to simply load up the binary groups in your readers (the top one for TV shows is alt.binaries.multimedia, and alt.binaries.hdtv for HD movies). Or you can go to NZBsRus.com, where the community uploads the latest releases as easy-to-use NZB files. Basically this is an XML file that tells programs like Newsbin Pro and NewsLeecher exactly where to find the binaries, with as little user input as possible. Simply open the NZB file with your News reader, and download all the archives. I’ll write about this step in more detail later on. But for the tech-savvy, this should be enough info. Since this guide was written, NZBsRus has lowered their daily download limit to 5, for non-paying subscribers. So you should also bookmark Binsearch, which will allow you to freely search for whatever you want, and have unlimited NZB files created for you. Sometimes I use the first site to find the shows, and search for them at the second site.

TV shows downloaded from newsgroups are usually in the form of volumized RAR archives. I’m sure you’ll know how to do this. There are also PAR files, for incomplete or broken archives. If an archive doesn’t extract properly, simply download all the PAR files available, and open the main PAR file with QuickPAR. Most of the time, your archive will be fixed. If not, the archive is either screwed up by the person who posted it, or you’re on a crappy newsgroup server and should switch to Giganews. By default, Newsbin will unRAR the file for you as it is downloaded. So that skips a step entirely – when the download is complete,  you will have a single video file.

Bit torrent is another way to download shows, but as I mentioned above, not the best solution for higher quality video. For shows like Survivor and Amazing Race, Bit Torrent is good because they usually have shows up faster than on newsgroups. The best place for TV torrents is EZTV.

If you already know how to play media files,  you can stop reading here. Go watch some HDTV!

Now you have your video file, which 9 times out of 10 will be an Xvid AVI file. I’m not sure why people still use XviD over DivX – it is MUCH slower than DivX, and the quality isn’t much better or worse. DivX used to come with spyware (although it only installed with permission) so I guess a lot of people are soured on that codec and haven’t forgiven them for it.

You probably already have either DivX or Xvid installed (they will work for each other). Most shows will work with Windows Media Player and these codecs. The 700 MB High Res Xvid files usually come with AC3 audio (I think MP3 still doesn’t support 5.1 surround sound), so you will need to install AC3Filter to listen. I may talk about how to set up AC3Filter later on, but the default settings should be good enough to get you started.

Some shows are released as MKV files, which is a container similar to AVI. These files are usually h.264, high quality, high res video with AC3 sound. For these, you will need an h.264 codec… And that’s a whole other headache. Some people like to install codec packs that are out there, but I have had those mess up my system before, so I like to keep things simple. The most popular is probably the K-Lite codec pack. There are also commercial codecs out there, like CoreAVC that work great with any media player you want. Again, this deserves more detail, and this blog post is REALLY getting long, so I better cut it off now.

This post SHOULD get you started. You now know how to download fast, where to look for shows, what to watch them with… Keep an eye on this site or subscribe to my feed, because I’ll be writing a lot more on this subject in the coming weeks and months. There is a LOT to talk about, believe me.