She complains whenever she can't find certain movies
She usually searches using the complete video title in the search bar, it's usually something like: Movie name - Complete Movie - Dubbed - Pirate Site or Uploader - Genre
She has a list of saved movie/video titles in a .docx file, where she also writes whether she liked the movie or not. Whenever a YT search shows something she thinks she'll be interested, she copies the title to the doc.
Will usually use that same search on Netflix, or continue typing and adding more despite no search results showing already.
Complains about video/audio quality
Complains when there's no dubbed version
Complains when the "movie" is just a trailer repeating for 1 hour
Seems to willfully ignore my explanations to why searching for and watching full movies on YT sucks (it's pirate content on a platform that doesn't allow piracy)
Ignores some 🏴☠️ alternatives I've set up, because "there's nothing interesting there"
"Forgets" anything I teach her about searching and search terms in 5 minutes
To be fair, most of the movies she "wants" to watch aren't available on any streaming services. Feels like I'm dealing with the world's worst pirate.
I hope this doesn't come across as rude, but as someone who has an aunt that behaves VERY similar, I can only say that some people do not want solutions - they want to be mad about something and others to agree with them. Finding easy ways to remove the problem instead of being allowed to complain about it is the opposite of what they expect to achieve.
My friend's husband does this; he runs a plex server for their family, parents/in-laws, and a brother I think. As the nephew got older he started sending in his requests, too. He also set up an email address just for movie requests and wrote a script to crawl the email inbox and automatically download the top search result. It ended up requiring very little input on his end.
Or set up Overseerr so she can request it herself. If you’re on a fast connection you can go from request to it being in Plex in about five minutes if set to auto approve.
I've taught her the same things several times over. I'm not joking or using hyperbole. I've had her write down instructions herself about some things, like how to take screenshots and save images (she wrote that down three times, because she threw away the first 2 notebooks) - despite this, she still copies the image from Paint to Word in order to save it.
I would probably try setting up a custom browser, either chrome or Firefox, whichever she doesn't use already, set up ublock, and set the homepage to a pirate streaming site. I use bflix.gg, which (usually) has subtitles of all languages for most stuff, but if she's not English speaking there might be better options.
Then just tell her that browser is youtube for movies. It should be easy enough for her to use and there's only one step to remember, open the new browser. You could even name the shortcut youtube movies or something.
It is normal to get frustrated by technology you don't understand. I know a bit about computers, but smartphones confuse and annoy me. Don't worry too much about it.
If you are happy to self host at her place raspberry pi with the combo: radarr, jellyfin and jellyseerr is what you want. I'm pretty sure the overseer app works with jellyseerr otherwise create icons with the shortcut on her PC. It's easier than Netflix in my opinion.
But I understand if her problem is right here, right now kind of problem, where she doesn't want to wait for it to show on jellyfin.
Seems to be whatever she finds on YT. Blockbusters, big budget stuff and whatever is on Netflix never catches her attention. She also prefers watching old (1990 and older) movies.
If your mom is that preoccupied with that nonsense, IDK it seems like a blessing in disguise because she could be distracted with that while you possibly have more freedom? Trying to find a silver lining here.