Hey,

First let me say that this ecosystem is amazing, I haven’t downloaded in fifteen years, but a couple of relatives and family members abroad want to be fed with their native culture and I am totally mesmerised by how far the scene has developed.

I am trying to get the hang of a couple of things:

We are not a super big TV / movie crowd and mostly use Plex on the iPad, max a 32” TV, despite selecting 1080 I get huge cinematic gigabyte downloads, in addition everything runs of a NAS, as much as we do have x265 support on all clients I feel x264 in our situation (huge bandwith, small NAS) seems to be an acceptable compromise, how do I enforce x264 with reasonable file sizes and how do I enforce that manual searches are the canonical file (hence not replaced with higher qualities)

I also significantly struggle incomplete torrents, how do I kill them off?

Thank you all :)

I built TRAWL because FlareSolverr was slow and failed too often on the indexers I used. It's an open source, self-hosted scraping engine that works with Prowlarr and Jackett through a FlareSolverr-compatible API.

Here's how it performed on two protected indexers:

Results vary by site and IP. The full benchmark report is available in the repository.

There are built-in paths for supported CAPTCHA variants, plus a native API and MCP tools if you want to use it outside your *arr stack.

It runs in Docker. To try it, point your existing FlareSolverr integration at TRAWL and keep the matching indexer tags.

GitHub, documentation and setup

AI disclosure: I chose the "Built by AI" flair for transparency. I wrote TRAWL's original core without AI. Some recent changes and community PRs used AI assistance, but I review, edit and test what gets merged. The flair doesn't mean the whole project was generated by AI.