Mount NZB Documents as a Virtual Filesystem Without Using Any Storage

If you've ever built a media library around Usenet, you know the drill: download the file, wait for it to finish, unpack it, and hope your drives don't fill up before the season finale. What if you could skip the download entirely and stream directly from your Usenet provider instead? That's the idea behind NzbDav, a WebDAV server that mounts NZB documents as a virtual filesystem.

What It Does

NzbDav is a WebDAV server that lets you mount and browse NZB documents as a virtual file system without downloading them first. Rather than pulling content down to local storage, it presents your NZBs as a browsable filesystem over HTTP(S), streaming the data on demand. The project is designed to slot into existing media management workflows by exposing a SABnzbd-compatible API, which means tools like Sonarr and Radarr can treat it as a drop-in replacement for their usual download client.

The result, as the README puts it, is an infinite Plex or Jellyfin media library that streams directly from your Usenet provider at maxed-out speeds, without consuming any storage on your own server. It ships as a Docker image, runs with a web UI for configuration, and supports setting a username and password for the WebDAV server itself.

Why It's Cool

The core pitch here is straightforward but genuinely clever: decouple your media library from your storage capacity. If you've ever juggled drive upgrades or pruned old content just to make room, that tradeoff disappears.

• No local storage required. Content streams from your Usenet provider rather than sitting on disk. Your library size is limited by what your provider retains, not by how many terabytes you've got racked up.

• Full streaming and seeking. You can jump ahead to any point in a video stream. That's not trivial when you're reading from a remote source instead of a local file, and it's the difference between a usable media setup and a frustrating one.

• Archive support, including password-protected content. NzbDav can view, stream, and seek within RAR and 7z archives, and it handles password-protected archives too. Anyone who's spent time manually unpacking obfuscated Usenet posts will appreciate that this is handled for them.

• Healthchecks and repairs. Content disappears from Usenet providers over time (retention limits, takedowns, and so on). NzbDav automatically replaces content that's been removed, which is the kind of thing that keeps an unattended setup actually unattended.

• SABnzbd-compatible API. This is the practical linchpin. Sonarr and Radarr already know how to talk to SABnzbd, so you configure NzbDav once and let your existing automation do the rest.

The combination of WebDAV plus a SABnzbd-compatible API means NzbDav can sit in the middle of a fairly standard *arr stack without you having to rework your whole pipeline. That's a smart integration choice—it meets existing tools where they already are.

One honest note before you get too excited: the project is no longer maintained. The author describes it as a hobby whose time has passed, and points to community forks (infinidysk and nzbdavex) as well as similar projects like altmount and decypharr. That doesn't make NzbDav useless—it just means you should weigh whether you want to run an unmaintained tool or follow the forks.

How to Try It

The easiest path is the official Docker image. To pull and run it with port 3000 exposed:

docker run --rm -it -p 3000:3000 nzbdav/nzbdav:latest

If you want your settings to persist across restarts, attach a volume at /config:

mkdir -p $(pwd)/nzbdav && \
docker run --rm -it \
  -v $(pwd)/nzbdav:/config \
  -e PUID=1000 \
  -e PGID=1000 \
  -p 3000:3000 \
  nzbdav/nzbdav:latest

Once the container is up, head to the Settings page in the UI to configure your Usenet connection. You'll also want to set a username and password for logging into the WebDAV server.

If you want to go deeper, the repo includes a comprehensive setup guide covering Docker Compose with an Rclone sidecar and healthchecks, performance tuning for WebDAV connection limits, Radarr/Sonarr queue management and repairs, and streaming Usenet directly via AIOStreams for Stremio. You can find everything at github.com/nzbdav-dev/nzbdav.

Final Thoughts

NzbDav is a neat piece of engineering that solves a specific problem well: streaming Usenet content without paying the storage tax. It's best suited to people already comfortable with Docker, Usenet providers, and the *arr ecosystem—this isn't a plug-and-play consumer app. The lack of maintenance is a real consideration, so if you're building something long-term, the community forks are worth a look. But as a reference point for how to mount remote content as a local-feeling filesystem, it's an interesting project to study and, for the right setup, still worth running.

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