The alt.binaries.* newsgroups harbor hundreds of thousands of images, songs and other binary files of every conceivable description (and then some), but they are hard to use because newsgroups were only designed to transport relatively small text files; large binary files like mp3s have to be encoded into text (typically using uu or base64 encoding) and then broken into a series of smaller messages. Fortunately, there are newsreaders that automatically coalesce and decode the fragments for you, but none of them do a great job of making the content very accessible (like previewing songs before you download them, for example).

Recently, I realized that it would be pretty cool to be able to access the binary newsgroups with Nautilus, since they are really just collections of files. So last month I wrote a gnome-vfs "nntp-method" module that does all the dirty work of assembling and decoding the fragments, presenting the user with a simple directory of binary files that can be copied and previewed like ordinary files. After getting it going, I saw that there were often sets of related files (like songs from the same album, or page images of a comic book) that should be grouped together, so I added heuristics to group related files together in directories, which made it much more usable.

Here are some screen shots. Just click on an image to enlarge it:

Once installed, you can access newsgroups with urls like "nntp://your.newsserver.address/alt.binaries.pictures.comics". You might also have to supply a username and password in the url (i.e., "nntp://username:password@your.newserver.address..."), since it doesn't prompt for it yet. You'll also have to turn on remote previewing in Nautilus's preferences "Speed Tradeoffs" section if you want to see icon text, thumbnails or sound previewing, which is highly recommended, since it's the coolest part.

One caveat is that you have to use a fairly reliable news server for large files like mp3s, since if a single message is dropped, the file won't show up. Also, I made it not show files smaller than 4Kbytes, since that removes a lot of clutter; we should eventually make it a configurable preference.

While it seems to work with the few news servers that I've tried it with, it certainly could benefit from more widespread testing; please report any bugs to the gnome-vfs list. I've got a number of significant extensions planned for it like making the directory writable so you can post files to the newsgroups, and also letting you browse through the newsgroups names, using folders (for example, nttp://newserver.com/alt.* would show you folders for all the subgroups); there are also smaller tasks like making it prompt for passwords or adding a preference UI to configure stuff. I won't get around to those for at least a few months, though, so let me know if anyone is interested in working on those or other extensions.

There were no changes required to gnome-vfs itself, it's strictly a module, so I don't think it can cause any problems without it being used directly. Unless anyone objects, I will check it into the GNOME1 branch of gnome-vfs soon (GNOME2 Nautilus isn't robust enough yet for it to be used effectively, but I'll check it in on head there as well).

Here is the source code if you don't want to wait until it's checked in:
nntp-method.c
nntp-method.h

Thanks.

-- Andy