Why not bring the old Par/Unrar tab back?

[Saskija]

I just had a situation that made me wish the old Par/Unrar tab was back and Newsbin had better error logging.

An hour ago I found there where three downloads that had just stalled although the files were perfectly fine. All files were there, one par was downloaded, all rar files were OK and could be manually extracted without a glitch. The only problem was: how do I restart a stalled extraction? There are no options, buttons and keys to initiate a file extraction anymore. The old Par/Unrar tab at least put you in control if something went wrong. All I could think of was to download a few small unnecessary PAR files hoping that would jump start the extraction.

At that moment I found the reason for the stalled download in the Logging tab. The drive with the Unrar folder had run out of disk space. After making some room and downloading a few more PAR files I could get everything sorted out.

A few thoughts:

- Is downloading more files really the only way to restart a stalled file extraction?
- Can the status messages in the Download List be made more meaningful?
- How about a Find option in the Logging tab? Maybe a few filter buttons to keep the clutter away? And a way to stop the auto-refresh because you get only a few seconds to check old error messages before the screen is refreshed and you're again looking at the most recent error (usually Bad XML ... etc)
- Shouldn't Newsbin report Out of Disk space errors more prominently? There's a critical error dialog box but because I now routinely hide it because the errors it reports are not critical at all and it's been just a nuisance.

[Quade]

1 - You could click the unrar button. There's an unrar right click too.

- Shouldn't Newsbin report Out of Disk space errors more prominently? There's a critical error dialog box but because I now routinely hide it because the errors it reports are not critical at all and it's been just a nuisance.

2 - Tell me which non-critical, critical errors it's showing and I'll consider removing them. I'd suggest disabling "Show server commands" and just reduce the log level in the advanced options. That'll keep the logging tab mostly cleaned out.

[Saskija]

1 - You could click the unrar button. There's an unrar right click too.

- Shouldn't Newsbin report Out of Disk space errors more prominently? There's a critical error dialog box but because I now routinely hide it because the errors it reports are not critical at all and it's been just a nuisance.

2 - Tell me which non-critical, critical errors it's showing and I'll consider removing them. I'd suggest disabling "Show server commands" and just reduce the log level in the advanced options. That'll keep the logging tab mostly cleaned out.

I didn't see an unrar option among the right click options (and I wasn't aware of the unrar icon). I'm gonna look for that option when I've got another download going on. If it's there, I don't know why I didn't see it.

I'll also turn off the server commands logging, hopefully that will reduce the amount of non critical errors. Loggin was already set to normal.

I'm still getting hundreds of "HIGH - Bad XML Line1:Column:0" or "HIGH - Bad XML Line2:Column:0" errors though. I wish I could get rid of those. Newsbin is digging through *.zip files and for some reason thinks regular text files (Eula.txt, Copying.txt, changes.txt) are malformed NZB files)

[Quade]

I'm still getting hundreds of "HIGH - Bad XML Line1:Column:0" or "HIGH - Bad XML Line2:Column:0" errors though. I wish I could get rid of those.

If you use a clean autoload folder that problems will go away. That said, I'll check into this text file thing you mentioned.

You didn't say what version you're running too.

[Saskija]

RC3

[itimpi]

I didn't see an unrar option among the right click options (and I wasn't aware of the unrar icon). I'm gonna look for that option when I've got another download going on. If it's there, I don't know why I didn't see it.

It is on the right-click menu as a sub-menu of the AutoPar menu item.

[Quade]

The unrar button is to the left of the wrench on the toolbar too.

[Saskija]

The unrar button is to the left of the wrench on the toolbar too.

Oh wait, those icons are in the Files List tab. I was looking for the unrar options in the Download List tab because that's where you see all the download files including the (very rudimentary) PAR information.

BTW How are supposed to find out the number of missing PAR blocks when an unrar operation won't continue and Newsbin doesn't find enough PARs in the download list?

I'm still unconvinced about the new UI without a PAR/Unrar tab. The current setups feels unnecessarily complicated. As a user you're given less control over what the program is doing. It should be the other way round IMO. In v5 you saw exactly what was going on: checking pars, the number of PAR2 blocks, how many blocks were missing, status messages that said the program was now extracting files. Now you get something like "D:64 DL:0, In:0 P:7 R:2" (????) and a yellow progress bar when files are extracted. If something goes wrong, you have to check the logging tab. The functionality of one tab is now divided among three tabs.

[Quade]

It's in the download list tab too. If you don't see it, you're not running RC3.

Right click properties on the download item will tell you everything you need to know about the par set. The same or more information.

I don't know about you but, I don't give a crap about all the par block information and repair or any of that other minutia. The only time it matters is when something goes wrong. If it does, the information is right there.

[Saskija]

Yes, I see it now ... (damn so, embarrassing. Must have been blind not to spot it ... apologies ...)