Unfortunately there’s not much discussion of open trackers in this community, but on that other site there’s an “OpenSignups” sub you could keep an eye on. Watch for general trackers to make a post, then you can built a reputation/ratio on those trackers and continue your way up the ladder

Either that or just watch the sign up page for the site you want to see when it’s open.

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Use it as an opportunity to find new music and fill those playlists out with a little more variety

Tools like https://ipleak.net/ provide torrent leak checkers. You need a browser to view the results, but they provide a magnet link you use in your torrent client to assess what information it is giving out.

In theory if everything is set up right it should show exclusively IP/location information associated with your VPN

As part of a websites DNS info they have to provide a TTL (time to live). This value can be just about anything but is often in the 30s to 5m range, and serves as an instruction on how long a client should cache the IP address locally before checking for updates.

This is because IP addresses can change, and you don’t want to experience hours of downtime for all clients every time your IP changes.

Every time your client queries your tracker for server updates (every few minutes, give or take, based on tracker preferences) it should follow your system DNS settings, which should involve checking your local cache, then going to the upstream server indicated in your system DNS settings.

If your system is set to a DNS server outside of your local network (e.g., 8.8.8.8) that request should go through your VPN

If your system is set to use a local DNS server (e.g., 192.168.X.X…), typically either done through something like a pi-hole, or if your router sets itself as the DNS server then forwards all requests, this MIGHT create a DNS leak around your VPN.

A good VPN like Mullvad should have an option to force their own DNS settings when enabled to prevent this leak.

Honestly there’s so much wonderful art out there not created by Nazis, I don’t know that it’s worth the energy to pirate Nazi music.

I totally understand the moral pirate argument, I just don’t have time to enjoy all of the games, movies, and music from artists I support. To waste what time I have engaging with content from people I find morally repugnant is just not where I’m investing

Even setting seed to infinite, if there’s just one other capable seeder, good odds no individual sends any other individual a full file.

You’re just sending jibberish chunks everywhere, not your fault if someone assembles it all from multiple sources, right?

I mean, this is c/piracy, you can pretty easily go download a non-HDR version of everything. If you do want HDR just not DV, most decent DV encodes also have a HDR10 fallback which should kick in if your device doesn’t support DV.

Alternatively, I’m pretty sure there are plenty of tools out there like DoVi Tool that can help you convert the HDR metadata to HDR10/10+ if that’s what you want.

It’s much lower risk, someone dedicated could prove you accessed a seedbox, but it would be a lot harder to prove you violated a copyright

if its possible to have Jellyfin read the name via a sub folder such as Movies/LinusISO/

It’s possible. Just make a LinuxISO (Year) folder in your movies directory and it’ll pick up the movie file within, regardless of name.

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies/

Naming only matters within folders if you have multiple versions.

I meant visually web vs disc. To me, a 4k 15 Mbps web-DL is visually 99% as good as a 60+Mbps UHD BR remux.

Web-DL may not be how I want to watch something like Interstellar (shot on 70mm film) but is probably fine for something like 7 Fast 9 Furious Tokyo Zoom Zoom (shot on Vin Diesel’s iPhone, probably)

Is the h264 or x264 part of the name the bitrate?

No, that’s the encoding algorithm, aka codec. As another person pointed out, AVC/h264/x264 (all different names for what is effectively the same thing) is a lot easier to process than HEVC/h265/x265 (again, different names, same end result).

Bitrate is just the overall file size divided by the movie duration, basically indicating how compressed the movie is, with compression coming at the loss of finer details. You can generally gauge bitrate based on file size. A 5000 Mb file that is 1000 s long is, on average, 5000/1000=5 Mbps.

Since you’re very clearly not picky, you’re probably best off going for 720p or 1080p content with small file sizes (1-5 GB / movie). Feel free to download smaller though, if it doesn’t impact your experience, just make a mental note if you ever find anything that is too small for you to tolerate, and set your minimum file size somewhere above that.

Based on your criteria, you probably want to steer clear of terms like Atmos, TrueHD, DTS-MA, and DTS-X. These are all terms for different flavors of totally uncompressed audio, which alone can be up to 5GB of unnecessary (for you) added disc space for a given movie. Instead you want compressed audio like DDP, AAC, or AC3

DivX/XVID are really old video codecs, kinda like x264. I wouldn’t fuck with them even with your preferences unless you have no other choice, given your average potato nowadays can handle x264.

TL;DR, based on your preferences, look for / avoid these terms, but know not all files have all of the same fields identified:

GOOD

Video

AVC/h264/x264

720p or 1080p

8-bit (you’ll want this over 10-bit, if specified)

Audio

DDP, AAC, or AC3

Overall

1-5 GB file size / movie

MEH

Video

DivX/XVID

Overall

Be mindful of files smaller than 1 GB / movie, they may be fine for you but this is where you can really start to see some gnarly banding

AVOID

Video

HEVC/h265/x265 or VC1

2160p

HDR, HDR10, HDR10+, DoVi, or DV (not mentioned earlier but these need special, more modern, displays)

Audio

Atmos, TrueHD, DTS-MA, and DTS-X

Overall

Really large or comically small files.

Unfortunately quality is entirely subjective. What you may think is fine, I may hate, and vice versa.

Generally speaking, for a given movie, quality and bitrate are linked, but two movies with the same bitrate likely don’t have the same quality because of a myriad of factors.

For me, with a few limited exceptions of movies I know like the back of my hand, I have a really hard time distinguishing between a good 4K webrip (15-20 Mbps) and remux (40-80 Mbps), so I have no issue keeping the majority of my library encoded at ~18Mbps

Unfortunately there’s no quality magic wand, but if you find a release group that does encodes you like, try to get to their home tracker and just let them handle it.

If you’re good with 1080p non-HDR content, for your use case you probably want to focus on “AVC” aka “H.264” or “x264” encodes of decent bitrate. HEVC yields better quality than AVC for a given bitrate, but comes at the cost of being much more intensive to encode and decode, which may be a source of problems for your 10 y.o. box. If your bar is “tell what’s happening”, you can go to pretty low bitrates.

Handbrake is a robust piece of software, but it’s really not beginner friendly because the automatic encoder settings will just absolutely ruin whatever you feed it.

If you’re on windows, check out StaxRip for encoding

But would you still watch anyways? It seems silly to me to watch a game you’re boycotting then just go around pretending you didn’t. Who did you watch for? Who are you actually lying to?

Not sure I understand the boycott but still watch crowd. Sure, not watching makes viewership go down a tick, but the Superbowl is so cultural, every hallway “did you see the game” helps push those viewership numbers right back up

Hmm, feels like it’s missing stuff. Does disc go shiny side up or down?

MKVToolNix is the right answer, BUT if you plan on sharing your Linux ISOs with the wider community you may not want to edit the original file.

Not sure what you’re watching on, but Plex lets you set a preferred audio language per-user, while Jellyfin and Kodi support external audio tracks as long as they are properly identified, so you could extract/find the English track you want and just toss it in the same folder

You’re not going to like this, but I have been encoding my own B-tier collection in 1080p at roughly BluRay quality with HDR & Uncompressed audio. A-Tier movies stay 4K Remux, but the B-squad gets the downgrade (but I’m not willing to give up HDR / Atmos)

It’s a poor analogy, but imagine a public IP like a hotel, there can be lots of guests (clients) at this hotel. Hotel policy is they won’t let any outsiders in unless you know the room number (port) of the person you’re trying to reach.

Imagine you and a friend are staying in separate hotels and want to give each other copies of your favorite Linux .ISOs, but neither of you knows the other’s room number - you show up at the hotel and the front desk tells you to pound sand because you don’t have their room number.

As long as one of you knows the other’s room number though, you can meet.

Torrenting without port forwarding means you can only trade your favorite .ISOs with people who have port forwarding enabled (sharing their room number to the tracker), which makes you less effective of a seeder. Enabling port forwarding allows you to share with anyone (sharing your room number with the tracker).

The elephant is the only animal with 4 knees.