It works a lot smoother for me, though I do see signs of things changing with torrent stuff.

Usenet is much more consistent and works better with automation software like radarr and sonarr. It’s all scene naming so you are less likely to pickup something joe blow made poorly. It is also much easier to find older things since you aren’t relying on active seeders.

It’s safer because it’s not illegal to download said files, just distribute them. Also no one cares about Usenet.

Never had a problem with quality, I have minimum and maximum quality settings configured for different profiles.

That said, it might be worth looking into Stremio and Debride. I’ve been seeing that pop up lately and it’s mostly torrent based.

One piece of advice if you go usenet, for good performance you want two accounts. Your main account and a secondary account on a different backbone provider. There are a lot of resellers, so make sure the parents are different. This is because they get a ton of takedown notices, so you might get holes here and there in the rars. But you can usually pick those up from your secondary. The software handles this automatically but you need the accounts.

Usually your main is some kind of unlimited subscription and the backup is a block account where you pay for a chunk of data at a time, but you do you.

It’s simpler to get onto good indexers for german media on usenet than it is to find a private tracker and get into it.

Also, my upload is slow so I’d have to use a seedbox to torrent on private trackers instead of using my homeserver.

I like P2P filesharing more than usenet since it’s decentralized. Most usenet providers with long retention are owned by only a few parent companies which is never good in the long term. As long as private VPN’s are allowed torrenting can’t be stopped.

On usenet with my indexer I find dual language 1080p remuxes for most movies, so I’d say the quality is as good as it can be. But this is probably also the case with a good private tracker.

If your already on private trackers that have all the media you want I really don’t see any advantage to usenet.

As for tools, it’s mostly the same as with torrenting. The arr* stack supports usenet, it just downloads with sabnzbd instead of qbittorrent (or your preferred client).

For all German speakers I have a beginners guide: https://github.com/PCJones/usenet-guide

I’m a torrenter with the sonarr radar lidarr prowlarr *arr setups.

I’ve dabbled with Usenet and here’s my understanding.

With torrents you’re all sharing something live, if you want ubuntu.iso and I have ubuntu.iso you can get it from me and many others who seed this file. A torrent tracker (or the dht) helps put us in touch so you know where the file is.

With Usenet it’s more like I dead drop this file, zipped and encrypted(?) onto a Usenet news server. All the Usenet providers mirror each other or something like that, so if you’re on a diff provider than me that same file should still be available. Then I tell an indexer, like dognzb or nzbgeek that this file is in fact ubuntu.iso and not garbage data. When you want ubuntu.iso you ask the indexer, indexer gives you a link and you get the file.

Beyond this, I don’t know about how much safer it is, but my immediate guess is that since you’re not seeding there’s less risk.

Now if you’re really snobby like me, you’ll quickly realize that the release groups you’re used to aren’t as well represented. I’ve often landed in situations where episode 7 of 20 is missing on Usenet…

As a snob, I’ve decided private trackers are probably the best place to be to keep my quality expectations satisfied.

Hope this helps.