Thanks for the tips! Could you explain how can one get about "getting a membership to a large private torrent site"? Also, why Emby rather than, say, Jellyfin or Plex?

I was a Plex user, but gave up on it when it started to suck. This was years ago. Emby was the other option at the time and I'm a big fan of it. I've never tried jellyfin. If you want to, email me and I can get you an invite.

The private trackers tend to be a pain in the butt to remain active enough on to keep your account, as they tend to require a certain amount of upload:download ratio. This can be difficult to achieve since so many members have high-speed seedboxes.

Just use https://1337x.to/ or any other public tracker. You'll be able to find 99% of whatever you want.

Paying 5 bucks to pirate seems to be missing the point of pirating for me IMO.