Virual
From the article:
“Industry traffic has declined in major markets like the U.S., Australia, Canada, and Germany. In several markets, we also continue to be negatively impacted by the war in the Middle East,” McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said on the company’s earnings call.
So it does seem to be working to some extent.
The IP address that a request is coming from can absolutely cause captchas to be triggered. If the host is seeing a lot of bot activity from your IP, it'll do that. That and blacklisting is why Mullvad rotates IPs.
PIA and Mullvad should have equal speeds because they both have 10gbps servers and wireguard. Both PIA and Mullvad use ram-only servers exclusively. As for search engine captchas, I never get them with Mullvad. The main issue with PIA is that they were bought by a questionable company that previously developed adware. You can read about that here. Personally, I would never use a privacy tool that is owned by an ad company, even if they claim to have changed. I used them up until the acquisition, then switched and have been extremely happy with Mullvad.
Banding is that annoying color gradient you see sometimes in dark scenes.
On the left is 8 bit and on the right is 10 bit.
HEVC 10 bit in order to reduce banding for animation, especially during dark scenes. I know H264 Hi10 exists, but it has poor hardware support, so using HEVC 10 bit is the best option (I don't own a single streaming device that supports HW accelerated Hi10, besides my PC). Also, an added benefit is reduced file size. I find that doing my own encodes is very rarely worth it, but when I do, I use FFmpeg in the CLI and not tdarr.
Why both Overseerr and Ombi?
It's not so much that I can't find things on torrents, it's that I don't have to worry about something not having seeders so it's more reliable for old uploads. In addition I've found it to be better for single episodes, multiple release groups that I use seem to only use Usenet.
As for things that aren't movies/tv, I think Usenet is better for slightly more obscure content, such as comic books.
1337x is my favorite right now for TV/movies and Nyaa for anime. Between that and Usenet, I can get 99.5% of what I want.
I use qbittorent and Sabnzb for downloads.
Since you've been out of the piracy game for awhile you may consider looking into *arr apps (radarr, sonarr, prowlarr, etc). They can auto download movies/tv you want and format them in a way that Plex/Jellyfin like, so you can get a whole library of content with just a few clicks. There's a bit of a learning curve to the setup though.