I’m personally looking at setting up whisper or whisperx with bazarr, to get subtitles for movies and series that I can’t find any to download.
Dnsmasq is dependent on whatever DNS servers you provide it with for its data, so if those controlling those DNS servers get ordered to block something you experience that.
Unbound however does the same job as the DNS servers you would configure in Dnsmasq : when you do a DNS request, unbound goes to the root hint servers, then works its way down through the authorative DNS servers til it finds what you are requesting.
Well, this is selfhost, so why not do that and set up unbound to use?
Unless you are running on Pata drives from the 90s or have movies in fucking 32k, there is no reason for movies on the hard drives to buffer.
Probably something going on with your server causing it. The HDDs connected to a bad card, or something keeping the drives very busy