The original post: /r/torrents by /u/ElevatorOver2436 on 2025-02-23 01:20:53.

I've been heavily torrenting for about a year, safely behind a VPN. I use qBittorrent on Windows and have been torrenting movies/tv shows.

I also have a collection of old DVDs, most of which are obscure stuff, impossible to find as a functioning torrent. I've decided that aside from freely seeding all that I torrent, I want to give back by creating torrents of those older DVDs.

I researched all the easy to find information about how to upload your first torrent and tried, but I'm not convinced I did it right.

Here's what I did.

• Ripped the DVD - resulting in a movie file in MKV format.
• Dropped that file into my download folder, used by qBittorrent.
• Used the Torrent Creator feature to create a .torrent file on my desktop.
• Within that Torrent Creator it asked for a list of Trackers to include and I ....uhhh, picked the following because I didn't know what to put: udp://tracker.opentrackr.org:1337/announce and also udp://public.popcorn-tracker.org:6969/announce
• It created the .torrent file on my desktop.
• I logged into my account on the torrenting site: EXT.TO and I uploaded the .torrent file.
• Once it successfully uploaded it became available via search on EXT.TO, so I used the option to download the .torrent file from there.
• It downloaded to my desktop where it should, and had the same name as before but with [ext.to] as a filename prefix.
• I double-clicked that just downloaded .torrent file and qBittorrent asked if I wanted to merge this torrent with the existing one, and I said yes. I did this because the information I read indicated that EXT.TO would likely inject some additional tracker information into the .torrent file.

Tada, at this point I thought I was done. My torrent show up in my qBittorrent and shows it is seeding that file, and shows that I have 100% of the file.

I had two friends go to EXT.TO, find the movie, access the .torrent, and try to download the file, but both claim it starts and just sits at 0% never getting any further. My side shows not a byte has seeded from that torrent. I'm the only seeder at the moment so I figured all traffic would be delivered by me. I can see I have a handful of active seeding of other files occurring, but not from this one. It has been 4 days now and no change, still not seeding this file to anyone and the two friends still show a 0% progress entry in their downloads queue.

What am I missing?