nzbSCAN
Copyright (C) 2010 - "Chainfire"
v0.5 - April 16, 2010
win32

Enough with the password protected RARs already!

About
Since mid-2009 it has become more and more common for password protected packages to be posted to usenet. Another common issue is missing articles and not having enough repair blocks. Waiting for your downloads to finish just to find out you either cannot extract the package or it is unrepairable is highly annoying.

And thus, I present you with nzbSCAN, which can detect password protected RARs and missing articles before you bother to actually download the complete package, and it is fairly quick at that.

This is meant to be an extra check for 'handyness' before downloading. If you run into passworded RARs a LOT, there might be some info you are missing: almost all password protected packages are also available on usenet un-passworded. If you are looking for something specific, first try finding the exact release name (using for example a predb), and search for that. Then try downloading the oldest posting, this is the most likely one to be un-passworded. The newer the posting, the higher the chance it is passworded. Also, the likelyhood of a package containing .partXXX.rar files being password protected is higher than it is for .rXX based packages.

Features

• Detect passworded RARs
• Scan missing articles
• Detect if repair is possible
• Multithreaded scanning
• Auto-download if no problems are found
• Intelligent file grouping
• Multiple RAR sets in a single NZB are supported
• SSL support
• Fast

Screenshots



The scan (including article presence) on the screenshot took 23 seconds and 2.5 MB transfer.

Installation
nzbSCAN does not come with an installer at the moment, nor does it include a configuration screen. So installation is rather manual. It's not that complicated, though.

• Extract the nzbscan.rar file to a new folder
• Find an NZB file on your computer, right-click on it -> open with, and add nzbSCAN as (default?) option
• Open the nzbscan.ini file in nzbscan's folder and configure the options
• Now opening an NZB file should automatically start nzbSCAN and you're all set

Things you should know (MUST READ)

• This is a BETA version, there will be issues
• The UI does not support "high DPI" setups, only standard DPI is supported at the moment
• The usenet server must support the STAT command and "groupless" downloading
• Nothing happens when scanning NZBs that do not contain RARs
• Turning off the article scanning improves performance a lot, so if you don't want to use it, do turn it off
• Only the RARs are scanned for availability. PAR2, NZB, NFO, SFV, SRR, etc files are not scanned for presence
• The scanning will only detect whether an article exists on the server. It does not scan the article for correctness (as this would require downloading it), so the number of blocks that need to be repaired may be higher than the detected number of missing articles
• Scanning performance is mostly latency bound in most situations. Doubling the number of connections has a lot more effect than having twice the transfer speed
• If multiple RAR sets are in the NZB with exactly the same "base" name, the PAR2 files may be linked to the wrong RAR set

To-do

• Improve the UI - icon, better looks, config screen, high DPI support, etc
• Integrate PAR2 reading as secondary check to make sure all the correct files are included in a RAR set
• Write out the NZB when you start the download in optimized form (smallest PAR2, RAR, other, remaining PAR2). It uses this internally but the original NZB is passed to the downloader at the moment
• More debugging :)

Donate
If you like this tool, don't forget to donate for my time and effort !

Download
Download nzbscan.rar (625 KB)

Contact
If you need to contact me, click the donate link above, it shows my email address at the top of the page. Please prefix the subject of your email with [nzbscan]. I might even answer, but no guarantees.

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