newsbin.com

Up front: may be it is hidden somewhere in the settings, I vainly tried to find it.
If it is not (and I believe it is not), I would like to suggest an option/feature that shows a kind of process bar,
or at least that Newsbin tells me what it is doing.

I had this idea in mind a long time, but never submitted it.
The other day I was a bit in a hurry for specific files.
I could see they were all downloaded alright, but nothing seemed to be happening.
Minutes were passing - nothing - I was waiting impatiently.

Then I started out to copy all the files to a different folder so as to extract them there.
But at file 95 or so it stopped, Newsbin was processing.
Waiting, waiting...
A few minutes later (still nothing happening, I didn't see Newsbin creating a tmp folder) I tried again
Same issue
Closing NB
Using MultiPar to check and repair
then extracted

All this took almost 20 minutes whereas the files were downloaded within a few minutes.

Anyway,
I could not see what NB was doing,
could not figure out where it was whilst processing (i.e. how much longer do I have to wait),
didn't see whether it was stuck somewhere (so I could have waiting endlessly).

Reaso for this request.

Historically this was shown in the Status column and/or Current Progress bar. I must admit, however, that Newsbin nowadays does not show anything if Newsbin is busy assembling a file in the background. I think this may be a by-product of the way obfuscated posts are handled.

This seems to be particularly the case where there is a Par file that results in the file being assembled (or perhaps it is a repair under the covers) without a corresponding separate Unrar phase. Maybe getting the status column or progress bar to show something in such a scenario is required? Even just an indication that Newsbin knows there is outstanding processing on a particular entry would help even if progress cannot be easily shown.

More often than not, the status is reflected in the grouped files and or the grouped PARS as they download and process. The new generation of obscured posts though, nothing naturally groups, not even the PAR files. In cases like this, the files will download, leave the download list and then get handled by the unrar/repair stuff in the background with no feedback.

One solution implemented in the latest RC is to force group NZB's that are auto-loaded, drag and dropped into the download list or fed in by Sonarr.

What version are you using?

In my case I am using the latest RC7 and quite frequently seeing the case where the progress bar completes to 100% and the status column indicates the file is fully downloaded. At this point there are no files showing in the folder (named after the NZB file) and the entry stays in the Download list with no indication of further activity. I presume at this stage the file contents are still in the form of chunks either in RAM or in the Chunks folder.

After an indeterminate delay the (unpacked) final file final appears in the folder. Sometime this is preceded by the rar files appearing after a delay (presumably because they still needed assembling) but sometime it is just the final file that appears and then an unrar is done. During all this there is no indication in the Download list that anything is happening. After all this completes the entry in the download list frequently (but not always) disappears.

It seems to me that it might be possible to indicate (possibly in the status column) that there is some assembly outstanding for this file entry? Ideally the progress bar would also start updating in some way as assembly progresses but I can understand this might be harder to achieve.

In my case, I am using v6.80RC2 b5029
Normally, when viewing the folder with Explorer, at some moment a kind of 'tmp' file is created, which, in the above scenario.., would have been the only indication that at least 'something' is happening.

I was had the folder with all the downloaded files in front of me, refreshed the folder from time to time, nothing like a tmp folder was created.

It is my experience that sometimes NB should be relaunched so as to finalize some task. For example: the download speed is 0 KBps, nothing is happening.
In such cases, I close and relaunch NB. Then more files are downloaded, after which the files are unrar'ed.

However, in this case, even that did not help.

Anyway, to cut a long story short: a process bar would be nice AND.. in fact it would also be nice if NB 'notifies' the user as to what to do should NB be unable to process the files, for whatever reason.
Obviously I don't know how complicated that might be though.


Thanks.