Hello people,

We (my SO and I) bought a Raspberry Pi 5 in the hopes of setting up like a HTPC on our living room TV, with the possibility of streaming torrents through it in 4K possibly. The problem is that I am an incapable failure absolute noob when it comes to everything internet streaming related, and so this got way too complicated way too fast and now I’m burned out and wanting to throw the fucking brick off the balcony, but that would be more than 150€ of our money lying on the cold, wet grass downstairs with nothing gained but a renewed sense of absolute failure on my part.

So can you help?

I installed LibreELEC and Kodi on it (and Mullvad VPN somehow, though the current setup uses OpenVPN which is getting removed in January 2026 so I’ll have to migrate it to Wireguard eventually…) and then got Jacktook up and running. Eventually I realized I had to install and configure some other things too, so I decided to go with TorrServer. I also bought a 30-day subscription to Real-Debrid because apparently that is needed? I have no idea anymore, Kodi itself throws errors related to searches and shit, but I don’t know how to access them on the machine, plus the UI/UX is way too clunky for my taste. I’d probably need to setup SSH to be able to access it easily from my desktop Arch Linux (btw), but last time I tried configuring even that was way too cumbersome and went way over my head. And the problem might even be the VPN that I set up, but I really don’t know anymore and hate everything about not knowing.