Brickfrog

This doesn’t answer your main question but I suspect their thinking is that VPN use is already very common in torrent communities. So common that it’s not really a big deal for users to browse the site via VPN if necessary. It’s not really that the staff there is going to do age verification, realistically if necessary they’d likely just block access from whatever states/jurisdictions are giving them issues with age verification.

That aside not too sure if what you’re looking for currently exists. There are a few general torrent sites that also operate Tor / I2P domains, and also the general torrent indexer Postman exists on I2P. The amount of users in Tor / I2P networks is way lower vs the clearnet torrent sites so a hyper-focused torrent site in Tor / I2P doesn’t seem viable but I could be wrong.

Yes, that’s why qBittorrent’s “Download first and last pieces first” option exists. You’ll be able to stream that .mp4 with its moov atom at the end of the file as long as you download that last piece during the beginning of the download. In some ways that makes qBittorrent a better streamer for .mp4 files vs other methods.

Maybe the other commenter is referring to some other media file type that can’t be streamed.

EDIT - Haven’t checked but am guessing torrentio also downloads first/last pieces first otherwise it’d be a terrible torrent streamer.

Since you’re just streaming torrents you could just use a torrent client to download the torrent(s) in sequential mode.

e.g. Load the torrent in qBittorrent and make sure to enable “Download in sequential order” and “Download first and last pieces first”. When the torrent is about 5-10% downloaded you can start playing the incomplete file while the torrent continues to download in the background. Load the file in your preferred media player (VLC or whatever) and play.

They are slightly different, I think people are kind of asking if you are specifically looking for a VPS vs a seedbox. Some people do want a VPS so it’s a fair question.

A VPS implies that you’ll be renting a server and installing/setting up all the software on your own. You’ll probably have some sort of SSH + root access to install things there since you’re doing all that on your own.

A seedbox is more like a pre-configured shared VPS so it’ll already have torrent clients pre-installed along with other software commonly used with torrent clients. Depending on the vendor and type of seedbox you often won’t have root access and/or SSH access, usually the vendor won’t want you to randomly install software system-wide that might disrupt other users on that seedbox server.

PS - !seedboxes@lemmy.dbzer0.com also exists, a bit quieter there but it’s specific to the topic.