First of all this the ground 0 for everything piracy (and more, generally free stuff) https://fmhy.net/

Here are the recommended film sites https://fmhy.net/video#torrent-sites

I generally download from https://rutracker.org/ (need an account to search not for downloading). They have pretty much everything that you can imagine (not just films) and in proper quality too (BD Remuxes etc). There will be no scene releases here because they add russian/ukrainian dubs and subs to almost all films but that's a small problem.

The other one is Heartive which lists torrents from the DHT network with Magnet links https://heartiveloves.pages.dev/ You just click on the torrent icon in the middle top of the selected film and all the available releases will be listed in plain text. The only downside that you need to be familiar with the release tags

Last but not least https://nyaa.si/ if you have a slight interest in anything japanese from manga to anime to much more

I just use ye old faithful of piratebay, through the tor browser so my ISP doesn't do shenanigans to it, then ffmpeg to get only the streams I care about (video, english audio / japanese audio + english subtitles) and reencode it to h264 mp4 so the files aren't gigantic and are compatible with everything. A bit old-school maybe but it generally works fine for me.

I live in the UK so I'll also sometimes pull stuff from iPlayer, which yt-dlp works perfectly for, and also off youtube

I highly recommend setting up a kodi combo: real-debrid/fen/seren/coco scrapers/tmdb helper with your trakt account/arctic fuse 2 (netflix like skin). It is a complete "stream everything" netflix interface.

It takes quite a while to understand how to set everything up and needs tons of customization (which is also a positive), but reddit is your friend. For example this is a good guide (although bit dated, some info may be older but generally it still fits https://www.reddit.com/r/Addons4Kodi/comments/zzfdtb/allincl... )

I know people also use *arr stack and jellyfin to setup their own library but my problem is that i never /know/ what to watch. With this setup, i just turn it on, get to browse customized/recommended and random lists like in netflix and it streams directly via real-debrid or premiumize

Oh; if you decide to have a dedicated raspberry pi for this thing (so you can use it with tv easilly), use a regular raspbian os or something, do NOT use libreelec. It is trying to be heavily customized, but in the end is just worse, buggy, bad wifi support, slow releases from small team, and unability to manually update packages

for public torrents, skip the trackers and just run a DHT crawler like bitmagnet. it'll take a month to "catch up", but after that you'll have more indexed content than any individual tracker & it'll be way snappier.

Same, I know how to use a terminal quite well but don’t know the latest best way to “sail the seas” as they say.

For old content I often spin up the old RARBG database.

Too bad it's gone.