brickfrog

Most people just use a NAS (self built or one of the pre-built types) & stuff a bunch of hard drives into it. Or just stuff a bunch of hard drives into their desktop(s).

Sure there are people outfitting rack(s) of server(s) but generally that's just the truly dedicated people going that route.

For what it's worth hard drives nowadays go up to ~22TB so your 34TB example would only need two massive hard drives. A compact NAS or small desktop would work fine for that example.

auto adding public default trackers to any public torrent

qB already has that, see Tools / Options / BitTorrent / "Automatically add these trackers to new downloads"

I don't use that feature but it seems to be there.

4 day old Lemmy account, seems like another coplover alt?

https://lemmy.world/post/9806730

Instead of having multiple dead communities you could just start posting in the earlier one(s).

Probably OBS would be your first try, it should be able to do a video capture and is Linux compatible.

Or if you're willing to set up a VM running Windows you could look into the non-free closed-source stream rippers for 720p/1080p. e.g. RedFox AnyStream, DVDFab StreamFab, etc.

EDIT: Just realized AnyStream also has Linux builds so that could be a non-free closed-source solution.

qBittorrent tends to be the popular one but all the standard FOSS clients should work fine with Sonarr (e.g. qBittorrent, Deluge, Transmission).

I don't have Transmission in front of me here to give you specific guidance but auth failed basically means you should double-check Transmission's web ui user/password/port number & make sure it's the same both there & in Sonarr. The same would apply for any other torrent client you want to set up in Sonarr.

Feeding it into DBinfo I can see the appended playlist files (appended with .1, .2, .3 and so on) call the same numbered stream files with no appended .1, .2, .3

Yeah that's probably right since each disc likely had the same named files in them (e.g. same name .m2ts files).

Where I am getting stuck in this logic is why there are 12 index files in the upload while there should only be 6 disks as listed in the .XML files.

You're right, that makes no sense either :/

Personally I would consider this corrupted data & just move on / try to find another source for that content. Otherwise seems like you're going to be spending a fair amount of time trying to reverse engineer whatever happened here.

What is your final goal? Are you just trying to mux the .m2ts stream files into .mkv containers? I suspect you can work with the .m2ts files directly & feed that right into ffmpeg or makemkv for the same results (granted not sure if you'll lose anything extra like subtitles). The trick is figuring out which .m2ts is which episode or whatever, you already have enough clues to figure out which .m2ts files are being referenced.

Also fun fact: Most media players can play .m2ts directly without needing to mux into a .mkv container first. I usually just hardlink the actual .m2ts files & rename them as needed for Kodi or whatever e.g. "blahblah.s01e01.m2ts"

I downloaded a BDMV folder that should be a copy of a six disk box set.

The download only has one BDMV folder? You should have 6 different BDMV folders if it's supposed to be six discs. Sort of sounds like the uploader tinkered with the data & maybe flattened the whole thing into one massive disc?

Once I organized this into a streams/playlist/clip/meta folders by file type and feed it into makemkv I can only see disk one.

Yeah that makes sense, 1 BDMV folder = 1 disc.

I'm not actually sure how you'd even go about flattening 6 discs into one BDMV folder, thing is many of those files (especially the .m2ts files) have the same duplicate name across multiple discs. Maybe the uploader used Blu-ray editing software to do that, or maybe you only have 1 disc not 6.

My hunch is maybe the uploader purposely re-wrote the whole thing into one massive disc so you're not really looking at 6 discs anymore. Not sure if this'll help but maybe try feeding the whole thing into BDInfo & see what it comes up with, at the very least it'll be able to give you some visibility into which specific .m2ts streams each .mpls is linked to, & that way you can hopefully decipher the different episodes/whatever that you're looking for.

PS - If this data was edited by the uploader I'm not sure how easy or feasible it would be to figure out how to split it back into 6 discs. (assuming this data is indeed 6 discs)

You forgot the most important part, subscribe to a usenet provider. Your usenet download client can't download anything without a provider.

If the VPN does not support port forwarding is it still possible to use for Linux torrents?

Yes with caveats. Torrent swarms need at least 1 connectable (port forwarded) peer for the swarm to exchange data. If all the peers are firewalled (not port forwarded) then all the swarm peers can see each other but cannot exchange torrent data so there will be no uploading/downloading in that swarm.

Generally speaking you won't notice much difference in large torrent swarms since those swarms usually have some/many connectable peers. But in smaller torrent swarms you may have trouble since your odds are worse that you'll find connectable peers in those swarms.

PS - Yes you are still seeding/uploading while firewalled (not port forwarded) just not very effectively. While firewalled your best connections will be with connectable peers in the torrent swarms. Not much to think about with public torrents but it'll kill your ratio at private trackers for sure.

Yes, usually at the end of the year if there are funds to spare I'll donate to a bunch of FOSS projects, other non-profits, websites, etc. especially if I use them year-round.

From the /c/piracy rules

2. Don’t request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote