I started thumbnailing porn torrents at http://www.magnetpeep.com, then the Pirate Bay went down (who I used to index the torrents). I need to get back on that project.
edit: Could you also talk about SEO and how you market your site?
I'm used to building pretty simple webapps, so doing something like this is really interesting to me from a learning perspective.
In addition to the technical tasks, how did you go about marketing your site?
Thanks!
So what I would do was check TPB every hour, and get the links through the API. If I didn't have them in my DB, I added them. If I had them I updated the seeder / tracker info.
Once I have that info, I scan the DB for magnet links that haven't yet been thumbnailed. I use the transmission-daemon to manage the torrent downloads, and keep a handful of them going at all times. Getting that working properly was kind of a pain in the neck.
Once a torrent is downloaded, I use ffmpeg to scan it and make 10 thumbnails of every movie file in it. The torrents are deleted after they're thumbnailed.
Not much marketing, I just post about it here and there in places where people would be interested in hearing about it.
I'm hoping TPB comes back up soon so I can refresh my data. It's way out of date.
As for ffmpeg, is that automated or do you have to do some manual work every time a torrent is finished?
Where do you host your site and how do you get paid? Systems like Google AdSense and payment gateways run from anything related to porn like it's the devil.