Torrenting is an easy way to participate in a community of computer-users, making information freely available to eachother. I hope to demonstrate with this guide that torrenting is more easy and more convenient than it's ever been, and that you can make most or all of your media subscriptions obselete with Free Software. Access to media should not be gatekept by money nor by forced interaction with vampiric capitalistic platforms.
qBittorrent is a Free software BitTorrent client that supports tons of features, but you don't need to know much at all to get started. To install it, go to their downloads page at https://www.qbittorrent.org/download and select the right option for your computer. It supports Windows, MacOS, and it's in many Linux distribution's repositories.
After it's downloaded, install it like you would with any other program.
To let us search for media, we need to turn on qBittorrent's search engine.
In the "Search" tab, click on the search bar, enter the name of some TV Show, and press Return. Very quickly, you should see many results, with slightly different titles, sizes, and numbers of "Seeders", among other things.
"Seeders" refers to the computers that are hosting the media you want. In general, you want to download files being seeded by lots of computers to get the fastest download speeds possible.
Pick a result with a name indicating the media, resolution, and episodes/seasons you want. Double-click it.
A download prompt will appear. It has lots of settings, but you can simply click "Ok" to download it normally.
You can track the progress of torrents being downloaded in the "Transfers" tab. When it's 100% complete, you can right-click the file, and click "Preview file" to have it play in your default media player.
If you're feeling charitable, you can leave qBittorrent running in the background to seed the files for other users. It'll help keep the media accessible for everyone, and improve download speeds for others. Using a VPN is recommended if you plan on leaving the client running for long periods of time.
Some copyright holders use bots to detects users downloading their media. If you're not using a VPN, these companies can see your IP and potentially send complaints to your ISP. If you download many things and want to keep your ISP happy, using a VPN will ensure your torrenting can't be traced to your IP address. I personally use and recommend Mullvad ($5/month for 5 devices), but there are other reputable ones like Proton and IVPN.
When you go to download a torrent and the download prompt pops up, you can optionally select "Download first and last pieces first" and "Download in sequential order".
This will likely make the total download take longer, but by downloading it in order, you can stream it in real time. Wait until about 5% of the download is complete, then you can watch it while the rest downloads live in the background.
Jellyfin is a Free and open-source media-hosting server you can run on your computer. It'll let you sign in to your library on a smart TV, other devices on your local network, or in a browser.
Setting it up is outside the scope of this post, but I highly recommend it. It basically just consists of downloading the server, configuring your libraries, installing the clients on your other devices, and logging in to your server.