I though it would make sense to have a thread per package discussion. Considering the effort that goes into making them its worth discussing the best one before the effort is put in.

 

Hellanzb is great but its not as powerful as sab. Where hella is the command line it is cryptic to use and more importantly the last time i tested it the par2 support was dumb. What it did is grab the par2 files and repair if possible. Sounds OK? Now lets look at sab. What it does is grab the data files and the small par2 crc file only. It then checks the data, sees how many blocks is mising and grabs just enough blocks to repair. Over a month this can equate to a huge bandwidth saving and speed of delivery. Typically you see 10% par redundancy so if you grabbed 10 4GB sets in one month then hella would grab 4GB of parity files. Sab may pull as little as a few tens of meg.

 

In real life after several months of experimentation sab was almost perfect in grabbing unpacking and organising files. Hella struggled on most days.

 

Things may have changed but apart from sab being python and bloaty from a usuabilty standpoint its miles ahead of hella and gets further with every release (which is usually every few weeks).

 

IMO there no comparison; sab wins outright.

I agree Sab wins hands down.  I would love to see someone able to get it working with UnRaid!

It would be great if we get Sabnzb running on unRaid.  I hope someone figures it out.  It was my first choice, but since I couldn't get it running I went with Hellanzb. I only tried for a few hrs before moving on and trying Hellanzb, so it might not be too difficult to get working.

 

  I just wanted to clarify though that Hellanzb does have the smart par feature you described where only required pars are downloaded, though this feature is off by default for some reason.  To turn it on you just set Hellanzb.SMART_PAR = True in the conf file.

I don't mean to turn this thread back into a hellanzb thread, but I gave some erroneous info in my last post. I misread the conf file thinking that SPART_PAR was off by default.  I failed to notice that the line that was setting it to False was commented out in the sample configuration file.  It is on by default, and if you want to turn it off you just uncomment that line.

No thats def excellent information. Im dont think i will go back to testing hella again although this smart par is very good... mainly due to the fact that i found that it struggled alot of the time with anything other than a fairly standard rar post. Thats likely changed as well mind you.

 

Im just such a fan of sab now. It does what it says on the tin. Its a resource hog when you have a fast connection but aart from that the majorty of the time you dont even need to use the interface as the download magically turns up nicely completed.

 

ive only ever used hellanzb, not keen about running a webserver on my macbook (or any workstation). i've never had any issues with hellanzb either though, normally just starting it up then dropping the .nzb files into the daemon.queue is about as hard as i gets. unrars, par checks everything automatically, no issues here