Latest and greatest is "plexshares" just google that. I've been sailing the high seas since 2002 and this is my last stop. No fuss, no worrying about anything. Wife and kids are very happy.

Wow. Thank you very much. Any advise for noobs?

Find one in there that you like in your price range. I pay $20 and have 1080p/4k remuxes. I used to spend at least 10 hours a month managing my own Plex/Emby, the money is well spent to me.

Also, buy an nvidia shield tv pro. It plays everything directly with no transcode, and handles all subtitles effortlessly without triggering a transcode.

I tried roku, amazon cube, apple tv, everything - the shield is the best still despite it's age. It's flawless.

rarbg.to is the popular index site. Bittorrent, the purple client. My smart TVs can access my PC's dedicated media directory - which took a bit of fiddling to get right. The big drawback is a lack of subtitles, unless they are baked in to the rip.

I still have Netflix and Prime Video (because of AMZ Prime). I have thought about dropping Netflix more than a few times after the price hike.

I wouldn't recommend BitTorrent/μTorrent, they're now run by a Chinese cryptocurrency company and have ads.

qBittorrent is an open source alternative that also has my favorite feature, downloading a file in sequential order so as to stream it immediately rather than waiting until it all finishes downloading.

I’d recommend checking your local library for their DVDs. Mine has a pretty good collection.

The search term you're looking for is "seedbox".

All the cool kids discuss seed boxes, etc., at a forum named “lowendtalk”.

It’s not my crowd but it’s interesting…

I have heard this term and briefly looked into it. My takeaway was it’s a vps with prebaked software/config offered by shady looking providers. Is that roughly correct or did I get lost in adwords?

Unlike your standard VPS hosts (DigitalOcean etc.), a good seedbox host will take your inevitable DMCA notices and file them in the shredder.

Basically, you'll find ones with fast storage with big storage for reasonable prices and that are... explicitly sanctioning this use case. And I'd bet the competent ones specifically design their network and client settings for good performance. In professional settings getting good large storage performance is sometimes a struggle or expensive.

I've thought about using them for non-shady data storage and transfer given the price and performance. Nothing sensitive which wasn't encrypted, obviously.

A friend can recommend bytesized hosting if you want minimal hassle. They have installer scripts for all the most popular tools (like the ones in parent) and it's really easy to set up your own netflix-like experience, with Plex as the streaming UI, deluge as the torrent client and Sonarr and Radarr as automated torrent downloaders.