I know all about this, my Plex server is rapidly approaching 200TB of content.

Is it really convenient? Sure! As long as you ignore all the work that goes into setup and maintenance. I’d be deluding myself if I tried to pretend that this is anything but yet another part of a really expensive and time consuming home theater hobby.

Even at it’s best DIY piracy is still miles away from just being able to open up Netflix and start watching.

Of course you can pay for someone else to maintain the Plex server for you, which isn’t a horrible option.

I see this a lot. I've never understood my peers need for complex "plex server" (or related) setups. Why not just store the files on the hard drives of your normal computers? 200TB is why, I guess, but this is hardly typical nor does it require "plex". I do just fine with a handful of computers with ~30 TB between them and some network shares. No "maintainance" required.

Plex actually requires 0 maintenance, it’s the radarr/sonarr bit which deals with content acquisition that’s often a hassle. (Still infinitely better than having to manually choose and download torrents)

Even a network share would take more work to set up than Plex.

Why Plex? Easy set up, vastly better UI than a network share, works from outside the home. I travel often and frequently benefit from the transcoding feature when dealing with shitty hotel wifi. Friends love it too.

Playing directly from a regular computer isn’t a very good option due to shit format support.

How is playing directly from a computer not a good option? All of my computers on my network are sharing all of their drives all the time and I just go on to other computers drives to get things and I double click them and they play on every computer on my network from Linux to Mac to Windows from H264, 65, vp9, av1... Anything.

Because you will lose out on things like dolby vision, even dolby atmos can be a pain in the ass to get working.

Can you even properly playback 4K HDR content from Linux? I don’t think so.

Format support on desktop platforms is awful.

What about opening up putlocker and binging a much wider catalog?

And now you’re watching stuff at an even worse quality than you would on Netflix.

Shrug. 720 or 1080 looks great to me. 4K just makes scenes look like sets.