Single file version available here.
Last updated on 2008-01-11.
To discuss, comment here.
| Next |
Table of Contents
http://www.slack.net/~hermit/ebook/documents/download.html http://javcentral.javtrade.net/abmea_faq.html http://www.vcdhelp.us/index.html?html/faq.html~mainFrame
An NFO file is simply an "i-NFO-rmation" file. (INF was already taken, in case you were wondering…) You can read these files right in Windows Notepad, or any text editor. The NFO should typically contain useful information about the post, such as number of RARs involved, number of PARs posted, length of the video, a description of the video, etc. In other words, it should be informative.
Primarily only seen with larger posts, or in groups where 20+ meg files are commonly oposted, Parchive files are a Parity Archive Volume Set, which isn't a direct archiving format like Zip,RAR,ACE,BZ2, et. al as mentioned above.
Instead, what they are is a tool to apply the data-recovery capability concepts of RAID-like systems to the posting and recovery of multi-part archives on Usenet. Current filespec and clients support the 'Reed-Soloman Code' implementation that allows for recovery of any 'X' volumes for 'X' parity volumes present.
In other words: PAR files allow you to recover/replace X amount of missing or corrupted files per X par files.
From the Parchive project's FAQ:
The primary intention of the Parchive Project and 'parity volume sets' is to release binary newsgroups of some repost traffic.
Example: You post 10 rar volumes into a binary group. But some people don't get all of them. One is missing r01, another one is missing r06 and a third one is missing r04. Usually, you have to repost these 3 files now. But now you can create a parity volume for your post (one volume would suffice for this example). Everyone can download it and recover his missing file with it. It doesn't matter, which file is missing, as long you have as many parity volumes as missing files. (Due to the type of parity scheme utilized, it doesn't matter which volume you get, just so long as you have one for each missing/corrupt file.) In this case, the posting of 1 file will avoid the posting of 3 files…
More information on PAR files can be found on the project's website: http://parchive.sourceforge.net/
Beginning in version 3.0, WinRAR now supports recovery files similar to PAR. To use these files, simply double-click a REV file and WinRAR should do the rest. To generate these files when creating a RAR archive, click on the Advanced tab and select the number of recovery volumes you'd like to use.
A major disadvantage of using REV files is they must be made when the actual RARring is being done. Unfortunately, PAR files and REV files are incompatible.
A. For all its great points, RAR has one drawback: if there's a corrupt part in a multiple volume archive, it won't always correctly tell you which one is bad. If there's just one corrupt byte, if the poster enabled the correct options when compressing, your RAR program might be able to correct it. However if there are multiple corruptions, you will need to re-get that file.
The problem is, sometimes it's hard to tell which RAR part of a multiple volume archive is bad. For this reason people have come up with various programs to do CRC checks. The most popular format is SFV, although SFV is only for Windows systems. WinSFV is frequently posted in the alt.binaries.multimedia.utilities newsgroup.
(borrowed from http://www.yenc.org)
yEnc is a new encoding method which offers efficient and proper transmission for binaries on the Usenet (or by eMail and other applications). Other encodings are BASE64, BinHex, UUencode, Quoted Printable, …..
Everything you could ever want to know about yEnc can be found on the author's "official" webpage: http://www.yenc.org
No! This is one of the most annoying things someone can do. If you want a certain piece or part of a video (R13, R14, and R18, for example) feel free to request it, but under no circumstances should you intentionally post an incomplete video, and ask for the missing pieces.
This is known as a "Here's what I have", or "HWIH" post, and is banned in nearly every group. All it does is take up room in the group with an incomplete video, and all the headers involved with it. Also, since many times two different people download a video from two different sources, the "R13" you want from post "A" may not be the same as "R13" from post "B", which leads to general confusion, and even more wasted space in the group.
A. VCD, short for VideoCD, has for some time been a common way for movies to be distributed in some Asian countries. Its quality is nearly as good as VHS. VCDs can be played on your computer as well as most newer DVD players.
While VCDs can be played on the computer, they have their own special format. Putting a DAT file on CD in the regular way does NOT make it a Video-CD.
Sometimes you'll see movies taken from DVD posted as SVCD. If made correctly, these are of much higher quality than VCD - in fact, they're rather close to being as good as DVD. However you'll need special codecs to view them, and in some circumstances can be problematic for standalone DVD players as well as slower computers.