What is an NZB RSS Feed?

An NZB RSS feed is a stream of links to NZB files produced by an NZB indexing site. The site will produce the links automatically by scanning Usenet newsgroups, or it will have human editors who post the links by hand.

RSS is the software technology that makes these feeds possible. You can view an NZB RSS feed in any “RSS reader” program. NZB files contain a list of pointers to posts in Usenet newsgroups.

So, the purpose of NZB/RSS technology is to subscribe to feeds that track the files that you are interested in, and automatically feed them into an NZB/RSS downloader like NZB Feed Leecher.

An example of an NZB indexing site that provides free RSS feeds is Binsearch.info. You can see their list of feeds on this page. Here’s a screenshot (click to enlarge):

Binsearch-Feeds

Binsearch organizes their feeds by newsgroup. Other sites organize their feeds be the type of media, resolution of video, sound quality, age of the release, etc. If you copy one of the Binsearch feed URLs, and paste it into the URL bar of the Google Chrome web browser, Chrome will show you the feed. You will see something like this:

Chrome-RSS

That’s the raw feed. If you come back in 20 minutes and refresh the page, it might be different if new files were posted, and Binsearch has updated the feed. The feed might look complicated at first, but if you study it for a few minutes, you will see that it is basically just a list of NZB files and links to those NZBs. So, look for a “link tag” which looks like this:

<link>https://www.binsearch.info/?action=nzb&106236898=1</link>

If you then copy that URL, and paste into Chrome’s URL bar, Chrome will download the NZB file for you.

Now, you might think that this is a convoluted way to get NZB files. However, the exercise that we just went through was so that you could get a feel for what an NZB RSS feed is. In practice, your downloader program will be monitoring the feeds, scanning them for your keywords, automatically downloading the NZBs, and then downloading the files from your Usenet server. It takes a little time to set up, but it is well worth the effort.

Binsearch’s feeds are generated mechanically, so they are of low quality. The best feeds are curated by human editors. Many sites offer such feeds, including FileSharingTalk.com.