Why Torrents are better than streaming servers as a self hosted solution.

Instead of using plex or emby, consider using a dedicated torrent server, and torrent clients elsewhere.

Quality

Streaming servers can never have the same quality as local music / video players.
- Video streaming servers like plex or emby, often have to transcode / convert the video to lower-quality formats. Native video players can handle x265.
- Audio streaming servers often can’t handle high quality formats like flac, whereas local media players can handle these easily.

The content on streaming services are limited to what you specifically have downloaded. This can never match the hundreds of thousands of torrents being shared by people across the globe. Search sites like Torrents.csv have often faster searching than self-hosted solutions (and you can self host the searching if you wish).
Which is better, having a collection of my music, or having a collection of all music?

With torrents, I can use any media player I want. Most OSs make this as simple as a double-click to play media. VLC / MPV can natively play high quality video and audio, x265, flac, opus, etc.
With streamers, I’m forced either to use a web client, or their own (often proprietary, sometimes paid) app. I prefer open-source standards like VLC.

Torrents have effectively solved the data distribution problem: content is shared in a web of connections, and a torrent with more than one seeder is already more resilient than the strongest streaming server.
- Why should there be 10,000 separate streaming services, not helping each other host or share the data, when torrents have made it so 10,000 clients are helping each other share the data?
Services like plex don’t offer this shared hosting.
Music / content is often removed from services like youtube frequently. Torrents can never be removed.
People often goto video streaming sites, and these are taken down rapidly. Many torrents have been reliably shared for 10+ years.
What about hardware failure? If your streaming servers hard drive goes down, you lost everything. With torrents, any with more than one seeder is safe.

Streaming servers require you to set up a web server, often requiring you to learn nginx / apache, as well as follow various setup processes for the services themselves. This is understandable for some tech-oriented people, but what about a non-techie, who just likes music / movies? Why should they be required to learn these tools?
- Content should be available for all, regardless of technical skill, or ability.
Downloading a torrent, and enjoying the media, involves:
- Clicking a download magnet link. Wait for it to finish.
- Open it.

Many of us don’t have data, or are often in areas where data is spotty.
- Its often a feature of services like plex to be able to save media locally, to avoid this problem. This is default with torrents.
Torrent clients like qbittorrent and libretorrent for android let you download files in sequential order, IE stream, at the click of a button.
Services like Torrents.csv let you search for files within torrents, so you can easily download / stream individual songs.
Its your choice where things are downloaded to. You can have a desktop or server with a highly available torrent client, and/or a smartphone torrent client.