I tried searching on reddit and holy **** it is a topic that is 100% dominated by spammers selling their own personal service.
If you click on anybody’s profile you can see they exist solely to recommend one particular iptv service. I can’t see any human recommendation!
How hard is it to set up? I have been thinking about centralising my movie collection. Can you do that with a Raspberry Pi?
You can, but playback might stutter. I use Kodi with older 4th generation Intel CPUs (4570s) for my media PCs. I use midsize towers for parts compatibility, but you could use little mini-PC options.
plex.tv is easy to install, downloading content requires a torrent client and a vpn if your isp is bitchy or you live in a crappy country
once you have your media on a plex server it is straightforward to stream from any smart tv or desktop or mobile device, the mobile plex app costs $5
for dumb tvs you can use a roku or (I think) a fire stick
I don't have automation downloading shows for me, I just manually copy magnet links from piratebay into my torrent client, then copy the shows into the folders my plex scans after they are done
it has never gotten to the point where the 3-5 minutes it takes me to go through my process a few times a week was worth the time to figure out how to get the automation working and debug the inevitable problems