Have you ever heard anyone mention an NZB file ? How about searching for something on the internet, have you ever come across an NZB file of something that you’ve wanted to download but have no idea what an NZB file is ?

In short an NZB file is nothing more then an XML file with file and header information for Usenet binary attachments.

Ok, now for the definition in english. Think of an NZB file as a container and inside of this container is information that points to file locations. An NZB file does not contain any files within itself and it is not an archive that can be extracted. It’s basically a file that tells another applications which files to download.

So what application would you open an NZB with ? Simple answer if you’re on a Mac you can use Unison if you’re on Windows do a search for usenet client. I’m not going to go into much more detail about opening NZB files and downloading, that’s beyond the scope of this article, but I will have another tutorial posted soon that covers downloading NZB files, configuring Unison, and extracting the downloaded parts.

So to summarize, if you don’t have a usenet account and you don’t have a usenet client then an NZB file will pretty much be useless to you. If you want to learn more then subscribe to my RSS feed. I’ll have a tutorial ready soon.