VPN is probably a good idea regardless of what you use, yeah. I haven't used a VPN in 20+ years of pirating. 😅 Probably a bad idea. 🫣

Torrents I'm fine with seeding. I never stop seeding my downloads. More data for the people!

I only download H.265 releases, so no need to reencode. I just dump all my downloaded movies in a movies/ directory, and all my shows in series/{Show Name}/{season XX boxset}/. Plex recognized everything fine, and now Jellyfin does as well after ditching Plex (because Plex don't give af about their users, as I've noticed, story for another time).

I'm surprised Usenet content is mostly just H.264. sounds a bit behind the times.

Anyway, filled one 4 TB recently which is like ten years old, recently been getting closer and closer to filling a 10 TB drive, and got a completely unused 24 TB drive waiting to be installed. Bought while storage was still cheap. 😅 Should be set for the coming years.

That together with the top speeds of my tracker, and free price, hard to beat unless you're worried about your ISP cracking down on you (which I'm not really as I'm based east of the pond).

I think I'll hold off on Usenet for the time being.

I appreciate all the advice! 🌹

I am downloading them, but not using torrents.

*i2p

So does a headless qbittorrent setup running on my 13yo t440p that's on and plugged in via Ethernet 24/7 🤷