J-Bone

Handbrake is designed for CPU based transcoding. You want slow CPU based encoding for archival storage.

You can mux into MKV via MKVtoolmix (available on all major platforms/linux distributions). You encode video via the x264 and x265 codecs, while I use handbrake, I do believe there are many other frontends that likely allow you to switch to GPU encode.

There are also non-english language public trackers that don’t leverage western style filename rules.

E.g. mazepa.to (Ukrainian) and rutracker.org (russian). The sites require registration (open to all), but the torrents are public (no ratio requirements and torrents do not have the private flag).

The search functions support English language titles with no issues at all. You can find any mainstream movie/show on both trackers. Rutracker has some niche content that I’ve not been able to find on specialized private trackers.

One drawback is that the trackers require local language dubs/VO, so some some content is never released on them.

if you can’t find it there too, you can be pretty sure that there never was a release, neither p2p nor scene.

This is not really true. I tried a few searches of more obscure movies and they don’t have releases that are available on multiple private trackers.

That being said, if you can’t find a release, the best option is to buy a DVD or BlueRay version of it.

This looks like an interesting tool/service.

How does this compare to jDownloader2? JD2 seems to be able to deal with almost anything you try throwing it (with some edge cases, but you can often figure out workarounds).

Surprised the authorities would go after users of a private tracker, seems like a low impact area compared to public trackers or even pirate movie streaming sites.

These are private trackers, right?

https://livetv.sx/enx/

Never watched US college basketball via this resource, but I have watched a lot of other sports and it works great.

It’s been around for many years, more than a decade (URL does change though).

Cheers! Will need to check it out!

there is a good community of French, Italian and Spanish stuff with English sub

That’s good. But you’d have to know what you are looking for (that’s what I remember from using eMule back in the day), right?

I don’t mind SD if the content is good. Just wondering what is available.

Cheers!

What’s the availability for movies and shows like?

Recent stuff? FHD/4K? Availability of more niche content? I am just curious. I used to eMule way back when, but I eventually switched to torrent since they seemed to have offered better retention of older/niche content and high availability of new content.

What’s the eMule network like these days?

Enjoy! We’ve been using them for more than a decade, the domain can change and quality can vary (unfortunately you can get buffering), but they have been very consistent overall all this time.

Have you tried rutracker? While it’s unlikely to have regional documentaries, they do have more niche b-movies and some documentaries.

mvgroup

Is pretty good for docs, albeit often many releases have no more seeders.

Haha, what a bunch of scumbags. They can"t even seed back when pirating.

We really need to round up all of Meta’s executive directors, seize all their assets (every last cent) and require them to do mandatory two decade live-in community service as junior custodians (the lowest level custodians in the whole institution) at hospice centres or infectious disease hospitals. De-mining work and resource extraction junior support would also be good options for community service work.

Not for this of course, more like knowingly enabling genocide in Myanmar and so on.

https://livetv.sx/enx/

No idea regarding automation, but you can get (some) 4K TV series off rutracker (a public tracker).

https://rutracker.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=119

The site itself is in russian, but search queries in English work perfectly.

Content from English speaking countries almost always (literally around ~99.9% of the time) includes the original English audio track. You will have to manually set language priority in your video client as russian audio is set as the default track, but this should be easy to do.

Keep in mind that non-English movies/series will include the original audio and a russian dub/VO, English dub/VO will not be included. English subs are typically provided for non-English content.