Amassing a media library is simple enough, and software like jellyfin can pull in media info and make your media streamable on various devices with a polished UI.

However, finding good quality (in terms of merit) movies and shows is difficult.

Maybe start with movies critics or a movie discussion platform like letterboxd to see what others are watching/rating movies.

Legality will depend on the country your in.

But assuming your traffic to/from the server is encrypted, your probably okay.

There’s no point in cheating. Any good private tracker will let maintain a sizeable buffer assuming you seed with things like bonus points/free leech.

If it’s difficult to maintain a buffer, plan to move to a different tracker that will.

Plus, the big private trackers communicate with one another. Get caught in one, you’ll be found out in others.

Jellyfin is free (libre) and open-source. Plex is freemium and proprietary.

Jellyfin supports hardware acceleration for transcoding and also allows playback through 3rd party video players (mpv, vlc, ect). Those are the features I care most about.

I don’t use Plex because it’s proprietary, so I don’t know what merits Plex has.

Too add on to this, many private trackers will not disable your account for inactivity if you reach a certain user class or make a one time donation (including OPS).

Plus reaching out to the staff on IRC is a good way to have an account re-enabled if it does get disabled.