What advice do people have for finding subtitles with things that require forced subtitles? Things like Lord of the Rings (where they talk in Elvish) or the Star Wars movies (different alien dialects) often require subtitles. Sometimes movies are entirely unwatchable without them. And for some reason, they aren't baked directly into the video file. This means that opening them in Plex or VLC by default does not display what's being said. This has led to many frustrating situations where I'll be watching something with a group of people and somebody starts speaking in another language. We're all left wondering "Are we supposed to understand what is going on here? Or is it supposed to be a mystery?" And then after 45-60 seconds of them talking in another language, it becomes pretty clear that there are supposed to be subtitles here, and they're just not there.

How are you supposed to know when there should be forced subtitles and when there shouldn't be? How are you supposed to find which one is the correct one where there are often so many options in Plex and VLC that say "English?" Most of them just play subtitles throughout the entire movie, which is irritating for most people we watch movies with.

I've tried messing around with open subtitles, but even that has been heavily hit or miss, and the last few days as I've tried it, the pages won't even load beyond the search.

Any advice?

I'm just curious as I've permanently dedicated my laptop to torrenting. I've been too nervous to install anything but the VPN and Firefox on it. Now, I'm curious to mess around with Linux some more, which is what I use on it, but I can't fully test out what all I can do with it without signing into accounts.

Do you use your torrent machine to do other things besides torrenting, signing into personal accounts and stuff?

The last time I tried emulation on a desktop PC, whether it was Windows or Linux, I had to install each emulator separately. It was a bit of a mess.

On my Steam Deck, Emudeck made it stupid easy. Retroarch wasn't terrible, but was a bit more irritating and buggy for me to get working. Either way, it had a bunch of emulators all in one spot so I didn't have to go hunting for a ton of them. Are there solutions like this for Linux as well now? What about for Windows or something like a RetroPIE?

I like to run qBittorrent on a Linux laptop to try and minimize the risk of Microsoft tracking what I'm doing and to protect my main system from viruses. I'm having an issue with it though. When I go into Advanced and select Network Interface, Proton VPN is not an option there. I only get lo, eno1, wlp4s0, ipv6leakintrf0, and tun0.

How can I get it to bind to the VPN so that I don't have to worry about it freaking out and sending unencrypted data through qBit?

EDIT: I also tried torrenting Ubuntu and killing the VPN just to test it out. It didn't stop downloading and uploading when I did that.

Pretty much what the title says. I noticed that ProtonVPN Linux has an EXTREMELY limited interface compared to their program on Windows. I also do not appear to have the option to bind qBittorrent to ProtonVPN the same way that I did with MullvadVPN. Has anybody experienced ProtonVPN on Linux and successfully used it for torrenting? It's nowhere near as simple as on Windows, from the looks of it.

What the title says, and that's pretty much it. Do you or don't you?

This is something I'm noticing in the ROM space, especially for non-retro titles like WiiU titles. The file sizes are often very massive, between 5 and 20 GB. Downloading from these places, especially the internet archive has a download speed of maybe 500 megabytes per hour. It's quite slow compared to torrents, but when it comes to the roms subreddit and megathread, it's pretty much all direct download.

How are you supposed to get some of these games with 4 day downloads when the downloads bug out after just 40 minutes or so?

We watch a lot of movies with alien languages, Marvel, Star Wars, Dune, that type of sci-fi stuff. We are struggling to find the type of subtitles that are just for when aliens talk. I looked around, and it appears they're called Forced Subtitles, but when we search for subtitles, all we get is the entire movie in English.

Where can we find these more specific ones?

I finally decided that I would get into One Piece. However, nearly all the torrent sites just have literal THOUSANDS of magnets for the latest episode, and a few here and there of various seasons. But I can't seem to find anything before 2021 except for a rare one off episode.

When you're digging through the super old stuff, how are you supposed to get past the utter deluge of new stuff?

Whenever thepiratebay goes down, it is a disaster for me to find anything online. The megathread is next to useless, taking me to all these crazy sites that don't have a torrent option. Instead, they have individual episode downloads of 600 episode TV series. And to access each individual episode, I have to click on a mirror that takes me elsewhere. Then, from that site, I have to click on something that takes me to another site. Then, I have to wait 10 seconds, then I have to confirm the download, then it asks me if I want to pay for premium, then it takes 30 minutes to download one episode.

I'm not actually sure what the community's goal is here. To me, it seems like the entire idea of piracy will go down if thepiratebay ever goes permanently down because this giant "community resource" we have is an utter cluster, with so much garbage shoved in it.

Outside of thepiratebay, how do you guys effectively perform any of the tasks one would want to do on a place like this?