I have off and on through the years downloaded some things by using magnet links from The Pirate Bay. I’ve been working on a nice NAS (DS923+) setup that is now running Jellyseerr, Jellyfin, QBittorrent, Radarr, and Sonarr. Everything seems to be linked up, and my media is being hosted a-okay. However, in order to get the Jellyseerr / Radarr / Sonarr bit working, I need proper indexers. I have never really understood this world. I know I need an invite, and I just missed a window with one. I’m trying to figure what is best and how to get in the in-crowd.

Can anybody instruct on how these trackers work when compared to just pulling from TPB. Also, how can one get hooked up with an invite. I didn’t want to ask this on my main account for obvious reasons, but I’m sure many people could benefit from learning this too; especially as the media landscape gets worse and worse.

  • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    13 days ago

    For most of those trackers you have to be invited by someone already a member. Sometimes they’ll have an open application or registration timeframe, but generally you have to have an invite.

    From the one side used in the past, they usually track only the high quality releases, more complete multi-language options, and will often have new releases quickest through partnerships with the various groups that make the releases.

    They usually have minimum seed requirements. Most often 1:1 ratio minimums and/or minimum timeframes like 30 day seeding. And they’ll have some sort of punishment or banning system of you fail to maintain this for an extended period.

    To help facilitate those requirements a lot of people use dedicated seedboxes and copy files locally for use. There are a lot of options for that available across a ton of price points, as low as like $5/mo or so for enough space for a single user as long as you clean stuff out after the seeding minimums.

    The semi-automated system I had setup at one point used Jackett (tracker index), Jellyseer (media requests), Sonarr/Radarr (release search and download management), ruTorrent (seedbox torrent), SyncThing (seedbox to local NAS file copy), and then Emby/Jellyfin/Plex (local media management).