Well, I used Ruby on Rails (I'm a Rails dev). Initially I expected to have to scrape TPB, but checked out google and found there was a PB API. I started looking into that, and was going to write a Ruby wrapper for it, but then realized if I was gong to do it that someone else probably already did it. Looked for a few minutes and found a couple of Ruby gems ready to go.

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 It's way out of date.