In a very cluttered neighborhood and I get about 300Mbps up and down on 6E 5GHz. My fibre connection allows 1Gb. I only reach those speeds wired.

Read up on Intel QSV. You essentially only need a recent cpu. i3 would do.

I hear good things about the Intel Arc A380. You basically only need it to convert video and the Intel is not too bad at that for not too steep a price

Why exactly can’t you use hardware acceleration with an nvidia card? We have Arch Linux with a Quadro P400 and using the nvidia driver Tdarr runs super smoothly. The way to get all your content in x265 is just by decoding and encoding, which Tdarr, Handbrake etc can do. But it’s one stream per nvenc/nvdec at a time so it takes time.

SoulSeekQT is a free p2p file sharing service specifically for music and you can specify file types or bitrate in filters.

Money is not the issue to me. I’ll happily pay for every episode I watch, maybe even per download. I just don’t want my content scattered across different platforms in suboptimal quality and be forced to pay a fixed fee even if I just need the one show on that platform.

It’s a service issue.

Love plexamp, hate the way plex forces album-centric metadata.