They previously sold out email addresses to an anti-piracy law firm which proceeded to extort penalty settlements from the holders of the accounts. This is why their upload bots were banned on leet x.

Of course. The YT-DLP team by refusing to support DRM videos gave Google a huge neon sign that said this is the one thing that will shut them down, the line they won’t cross. Google has targeted the big front end instances with rate limits and blocks and this is the next step.

Our only hope really is that the current YT-DLP team hands the reins over to people in countries that don’t give a shit about copyright and they put back in the ability to download and decrypt DRM protected video.

can they be added to the search function in qbittorrent?

Nearly all can. All the one’s you’d want anyways work with Jackett. They don’t work via direct plugins but just run Jackett, follow its instructions and connect it to qBittorrent and you’re good to go searching just the same as before. Some annoying ones occasionally require setting up another software like Flaresolver but for the most part the big easy to get into ones that open their doors annually work without that.

While there will likely be some openings throughout the year the fact is most trackers open in the period from Thanksgiving/late November through early January. TL opens then basically every year, a number of more exclusive trackers do open signups then, some for only 24 hours so get an RSS feed of that and remember to sign up IMMEDIATELY as soon as you see a post as the post on reddit may have been made 22 hours into a 24 hour open window, you just don’t know. TL though at least tends to stay open for several days. So if you have no luck before then, wait until that time of the year and then check daily or even twice daily if you can, once before bed, once earlier when you get up or lunch or after work, whatever.

What they told you is misleading.

Transcoding and burning in subtitles for Plex and similar only happens in some cases if your streaming device doesn’t support image based subtitles. Plex themselves could fix this on a lot more devices but don’t.

10 years ago it was the case that there were a LOT of issues with anything but text subtitles. These days it depends. If you’re running it directly off a smart tv (bad experience anyways, not recommended) it’s likely to be an issue. If you’re using an Android streaming device or Apple TV or gaming console there’s a good chance the subs just work.

Truth is lots of things can force transcoding with Plex including using certain audio formats in certain media containers. Most of these days picture subs work. If you can get text subs it’s not a bad thing but I wouldn’t go through the hassle of doing flawed OCR unless you can confirm it’s an issue you’re experiencing with your setup.

Console batch file for mkv merge should do that as long as subs are named same as video files (or something consistent like that name +subs).

You’d want to target the sub files not idx. If that fails I’d just do an intermediate step of merging the sub and idx files into an mks file then merging that into the mkv. The gui only needs the sub files added. I’ll try and come back to this though someone else already posted a script that should be able to be adapted to do this.