I have Plex, Radarr, Prowlarr, and Qbittorrent all installed on the same dedicated server. I’m using a SOCKS5 proxy instead of a VPN, it works great because I set up Qbittorrent to use the proxy and I just leave it running 24/7. I also have Tailscale installed for remote access, setup for that is dead simple.

Here’s my workflow if I’m away from home:

1. Turn on Tailscale on my phone.
2. Open my radar app (it’s called LunaSea).
3. Search for and add the movie I want.

That’s it. If I’m already at home, step 1 is not necessary.

Prowlarr and Radarr find the movie on my registered indexers, at the desired quality, and send the torrent to Qbittorrent. Then when the download is finished they automatically rename the files and move them to my Plex library (and they could do the same with Jellyfin). Roughly 10 minutes after I finish step 3 (more or less depending on seeds), the movie magically appears in my Plex library. I don’t have to turn a VPN on or off.

This is utter nonsense. First, let me point out that this is an ad for Surfshark, a VPN company. They’re trying to sell you their service by scaring you.

Second, their methodology is absolutely useless, it’s an easy and very common way to come up with a clickbait article like this. They’re just looking at app store permissions, and assuming the app with the most permissions is bad and the one with the least permissions is good. Which is utter nonsense, it might be that the apps with more permissions NEED those permissions because they have more FEATURES.

I could make a “language learning” app that ONLY asks for the audio recording permission, and then sell audio recordings of my users to the highest bidder. But Surfshark would praise my literal spyware as “privacy-focused” because it only needs one privacy permission!

The way to ACTUALLY do this properly would be to fully audit each app, find out WHY it’s asking for additional permissions, go over the full privacy policy, and do some packet captures to figure out when the app is phoning home to send data, and what servers it’s connecting to. Contact the app owners, ask them why exactly their app needs each permission. Consult some experts.

But that’s too hard for Surfshark, they just want to write a scary article so that they can sell you a VPN that doesn’t really make you safer on the internet.

EDIT: You know why I dropped Surfshark? They started bundling a “virus scanner” in with their “privacy-focused” VPN client. So my “privacy” tool wanted to scan all my files all of a sudden? GTFO.

You don’t use Mullvad for their performance, you use them for their insanely paranoid security and privacy practices.

And for the record, I was never impressed with Surfshark speeds. I dropped them when they bundled a virus scanner into their VPN client, that’s sketchy as hell. I don’t want my VPN provider scanning my files.

You are incorrect. Look through their blog archive (scroll to the bottom): https://mullvad.net/en/blog/

They’ve been posting steadily for over a decade, maybe the posts just got more popular this year on whatever sites you browse

You can convert most movies to 1080p x265 and it takes up a little over a gigabyte of space. If you’re already hosting 4K movies, why do you give a shit about another gigabyte? If you’re NOT hosting 4K movies, then you have ZERO reason to transcode, just make everything 1080p and call it a day.

Also, transcoding DOES cost you money, your electric bill goes up, even if you don’t track it or care. So spend the extra fifty bucks on a few extra terabytes now rather than spending it over the course of several months transcoding. And if you cut out transcoding, you can run Plex on VERY cheap hardware, so that saves you money too.

Transcoding. Is. Dumb.

Don’t transcode on Plex if you can avoid it. It’s very compute-intensive and it makes your streams look like shit. Convert your videos to nice formats that most people can direct play (like x264 or x265) and turn transcoding off. It’ll keep your hardware running longer, keep your electric bill down, and your streams will look better. Win-win-win-win.

Yessss that’s a nice sweet spot in pricing, still too rich for my blood but I bet it’ll drive the prices further down on the $300-$400 cards.

It should be noted that this is advice specific to white men in Western countries 😆 but yes, it’s true.

China based. I wouldn’t put anything private or sensitive on their servers…

This right here. We are undoubtedly the plastic generation. And it’s not letting up any time soon; our kids will be included in this cohort as well. Banning plastic bags in cities is next to useless when everything we eat, everything we drink, and everything we buy is wrapped in plastic.

Sounds like your TV isn’t fully compatible with x265. You can get around that by using a modern streaming stick that supports it.

H265 is objectively superior in just about every way UNLESS you’re trying to play it on hardware that doesn’t support it. The only reason to use H264 is for broad compatibility.