Debris services (Real-Debrid, AllDebris) basically cache most popular torrents and give you direct https links to the video streams. Frontends for these services include Stremio, Syncler, etc. I adore both, but Stremio is much more lightweight which works better on my GoogleTV / FireStick. You select what you want to watch (the apps sync with Trakt, fwiw) and it immediately shows you the versions it has available that are cached. I choose 4K Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos whenever it’s available.
Naw, I don’t bother with a VPN since I’m not torrenting anything. I just set my router’s DNS to something other than the ISP’s default.