I hope you’ll find an easier way to do it, but if it was me in your shoes, I’d probably drive out to them. You driving the U-Haul with them driving your car home sounds like a good idea. It’s the safest option to make sure they don’t run into even MORE trouble.

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.

Ah yes, they fired a bigot. How dare they!

I’ll see if I can find a password manager created by other small-minded bigots and let you know.

That is needlessly complicated. Just force qbittorrent to only use your VPN network interface and you don’t need any of that: https://lifehacker.com/you-should-really-bind-your-vpn-to-your-torrent-client-1849779407

This has the advantage of giving you the “kill switch” feature without having to download your VPN’s proprietary app. It works with Wireguard, OpenVPN, whatever. Qbittorrent is actually one of the few clients that has this feature, one of the reasons it’s so widely recommended.

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.