Dude…I’m literally responding to someone who says “why use RD when torrentio is free”. But by all means, mansplain RealDebrid to everyone in this thread that knows exactly what we are talking about.
I use PIA’s Canada servers for torrenting because they are (geographically) closest to the US with port forwarding. No issues, been using them for years.
If you are using torrentio, you are downloading via torrent on your home network. Depending on what country you are in, it’s not safe to do that without a VPN. If you are trying to watch on a TV via Fire stick or Chromecast, setting up a VPN is not easy.
Fun fact: epub can contain a virus without being an exe. Epub is essentially an archive of text, image and stylesheet files (try opening it with WinRAR, you might be surprised). You can put a malware script inside that archive, and it won’t flag until you try opening that ebook on your PC. So you actually need to be more careful with ebooks than, say, video or audio files.
You don’t need a VPN with Torrentio + Real Debrid. You are not torrenting - they already torrented it for you, and you are streaming the cached file directly from the RD servers. I think the only “catch” is that it’s not free (obviously) so I don’t think you can call it “free lunch” lol. Torrentio addon specifically scrapes the debrid service - now, if you were to install, say, TPB addon for Stremio, it would be torrenting, so you don’t want to do that without a VPN.