Bitsearch.to lets you upload anything, and its searched by jackett. Same with the sister site solidtorrents.to. Solid actually has a python plugin for qbittorrent so its even easier to search/discover.

felt like banging my head against a brick wall explaining to that sub multiple times a week that you have to create firewall rules and hosts file entries to stop those popups.

Start with doing simple disc rips, like cd’s(Exact Audio Copy), dvds(MakeMKV, DVD decryptor, eac3to), blurays(MakeMKV, eac3to).

Figure out how to encode and compress video so that it still looks good, you can still find some old scene rule nfo’s to have a better idea on what settings to use to encode. I use a gui called qvs to do encodes, theres also another one called staxrip, you can also learn how to just use command line arguments and just use x264 or x265 from the command line.

If you’re not just wanting to just make remuxes with makeMKV, you’re probably going to want to use mkvtoolnix to put everything back together as a video file.

You can use SubtitleEdit to convert PGS or VOB subs into the plaintext format SubRip(SRT) which has more compatibility with media servers like jellyfin.

Consider trying to find some obscure titles which may only have dead torrents, no torrents, or only low quality ones (old ~700mb VCD rips) to track down a physical copy to make a new torrent from.

Pick out some dead torrents to camp indefinitely. A seeder may one day return. Also, if you’re on a private tracker, a lot of the time you can download the same torrent that also exists as a dead public torrent, and bring the public one back to life. This can be a bit tricky sometimes.

If you have a beefy computer, you could consider making encodes in the new AV1 codec, which is really good at preserving quality but is rather intensive to encode in.

If you join a private tracker, a lot of the time their forums will have some educational resources on making rips yourself.

Actually cracking new drms requires skill, and the skills you need are called reverse engineering. You’re going to have to learn the ins and outs of assembly language, specifically decompiled binary represented as assembly language. Theres a site which has simple tutorial programs called crackme’s for dipping your toes into this sort of thing. Theres not going to be any public tutorials on how to crack xyz drm because if those existed, the drm would just be patched. Speaking of that, if you’re doing software cracks you’ll need to learn how to obfuscate your crack to keep the origin company from figuring out how you did it, or else it will just get patched before you do your next one. That doesn’t really apply to audiovisual drm since that is all about extracting a stream, and is a bit more straightforward.

I may update this post if anything else comes to mind, good luck to you!

Edit 1: Make your own ascii art NFO’s with PabloDraw

So, you have content of the torrent, but don’t know the original torrent it goes to, right?

The first place I’d look would be bitsearch.to. It’s a pretty extensive dht network crawler that actually has a lot of rarbg archived. Be warned, you can’t use .'s or a few other ‘special’ characters, just replace them with spaces. If that fails to find anything, theres also btdig, but at this point you will probably want to install a program called jackett to search all public sites at the same time. Hopefully that would be a good tool for you.

When you find the torrent the file is from, you may need to find additional files, like advertisement txt files for dead torrent trackers. You may have some luck finding these in other torrents, you just have to match the filesize really.

If there aren’t any seeders whatsoever, magnet links won’t work. You will have to try and find the .torrent manually. You can pretty often find these on caching sites. The three I know of are itorrents.org, torrage.info, and btcache.me. Hopefully one of these still has the file.

When you go to add the torrent, set the stop condition in qbittorrent to files checked. This checks the integrity of the files you have on disk against the torrent you opened. Just be sure to save it to the same folder. If it checks without a hitch, you should be able to start seeding. Remember to port forward!