Binary News Reaper

BNR is a news reader software application especially tailored for binary articles (articles from alt.binaries.* newsgroups, for example).The acronym BNR stands for "Binary News Reader" (when talking about BNR1), or for "Binary News Reaper" (when talking about BNR2. Confused? Didn't think so. :-)

BNR downloads and decodes binary articles and saves them on your hard drive to the directory of your choice. BNR can also download text articles, but other news readers are probably better suited to this task.

BNR will run on PC hardware running either Windows or Linux operating systems.

Here are some key features of "Binary News Reaper":

￭ Support for multiple news servers simultaneously. This means that you can open a newsgroup, and BNR connects to all the news servers (which you have access to) that carry the newsgroup in question and downloads the headers of new articles. Thus you might be able to fully download a multi-part article even though none of the news servers has all the parts, as long as each part can be found in at least one of the servers. ￭ Checking for file existence before you start downloading an article. BNR finds existing files on your hard disk and even on your removable disks (using a special database on your hard disk) so that you don't accidentally download a file you already have. ￭ Finding an index file to decide whether to download an image. BNR can find and show an index file (for example, 1234hix1.jpg) when you select an article with a filename like 1234h12.jpg and click "Find index...". ￭ Plugin support. If BNR lacks a feature you find important, you can extend the capabilities of BNR by writing plugins. ￭ Header download optimization. To save time using a slow connection (modem, for example) BNR downloads only the minimum amount of header data. You may even decide to leave out stuff like article authors, article dates, etc. The only required headers are the article subjects (so you know what the article contains), article sizes (so you know how long the download would take) and message IDs (so BNR can match the same article on several news servers). ￭ Article download optimization. BNR only downloads the article body, and all articles are downloaded in the order they would expire on the news server in question. If the same article exists on several servers, BNR will use the fastest available server. ￭ Connect-on-demand. You don't need to be connected to the news servers all the time, only while you are downloading article headers or the articles themselves. BNR knows this, and automatically disconnects and reconnects when necessary. ￭ Caching of article headers. You can mark a group of articles, and later decide you don't want to download all of them now. You can disconnect from the servers and exit BNR, and when you restart BNR at some later time, BNR will start downloading those articles you marked for download. ￭ Internal JPEG viewer. You can doubleclick on an existing filename, and BNR will display the image. ￭ Automatic multi-part article combining and completeness checking. You don't need to manually attempt to find all the parts by looking at the subjects, BNR does this for you. BNR also checks that all parts for the multi-part articles are available so you can decide whether you want to download the articles. ￭ Multiple Document Interface. BNR is a MDI software, which means you can have several views to the same data. You can for example open the same newsgroup several times, viewing the new articles on one window and downloaded articles on another window. ￭ Newsgroup-specific settings. Most of the settings of BNR can be made different for different newsgroups. You might for example want to download JPEG images to one directory and MP3 files to a different directory. You might also want to have different removable drive databases for these two file types, in case you have separate CD-Rs for JPEGs and MP3 files. ￭ Customizable interface. You can customize keyboard shortcuts, the font and colors that are used in the article list window, and various other features of BNR. ￭ "Meta-groups". As with servers, you can now combine several newsgroups to create a "meta-group", which you can then open and view like it was any single newsgroup. ￭ Automatic header refresh. You can let BNR2 refresh headers periodically even when you are not around, for any newsgroups whether they are open or not. ￭ Regular expressions. BNR2 supports filters based on Perl-compatible regular expression. ￭ yEncode support. BNR2 supports yEncode , the new encoding method that greatly reduces the overhead of posting binary articles on Usenet. ￭ NewsRC support. BNR2 supports importing and exporting the list of read articles using standard NewsRC files to help synchronize multiple newsreaders. ￭ Server modes (blind servers and header servers) . BNR2 allows assigning roles to individual servers such as Article-Only servers, which skip downloading headers and attempts to download articles based on the Message-ID's already downloaded from one or more other server. ￭ NewzBin NZB support. BNR2 supports importing and exporting newzBin Message List (NZB) files for downloading articles without downloading any headers. ￭ IPv6 support. BNR2 supports accessing IPv6 news servers on OS's that are IPv6-enabled.