Right now I'm looking forward to watching two movies: "The Boy and the Heron" and "Godzilla Minus One"
Neither is on streaming services or BluRay yet. Which means that good quality torrents (IMO at least web-rip) are not available yet.
Is there a good way of figuring out when a decent torrent is available? I don't mean setting up some service like sonarr/radarr because those seem overkill (though my mind on this can be changed with a persuasive argument). Rather maybe some website I can check? Thanks.
There's a site called DVD release date or something like that with the calendar of dvds/blue ray disk releases, if you want the best quality. They also gave the streaming date if you are ok with streaming quality.
Radarr must use some API that you can check - it knows when things are still in theater so it waits until things have a digital or physical release before trying to download, and I find it helpful to log in to radarr because hovering over the movie year shows theatrical/digital/physical release dates but that information is probably available separately from whatever source it uses.
Any idea if Radarr is worth using with just public torrent trackers?
That's what I do and it works great for me, most of what it grabs comes from 1337x, nyaa.si, torrent Galaxy, one of the kickass clones, extra torrent, and piratebay. I don't use private trackers or Usenet at all. Same with sonarr. Both are hooked up to prowlarr which makes it so easy to add new public trackers in a few clicks.
Actually for the first several years I just used sonarr/radarr for renaming and getting insight into the composition of my collection (ie checking series completeness, finding stuff I wanted to upgrade, etc). Only in the last few years have I actually started using it for download automation.