yes, it’s mostly things like games or software

though, I have seen more & more reports of people finding malicious disguised LNK files in their downloads and torrents, which will run some arbitrary command if you open that: Windows does not ever show the LNK extension, so a file could be named “<whatever>.mkv.lnk”, and you would only know if you checked the “file type” column in Explorer (which would read “Shortcut” instead of something like “Matryoshka file”), or when you see the cmd.exe window flicker open and close.

bonus edit: LNK is the native file extension that Windows uses to link app shortcuts, such as the shortcuts on your desktop.

The docs say jellyfin-ffmpeg is only needed on Debian distros, like Debian itself or Ubuntu, other distros like Fedora should be able to use their respective ffmpeg packages. https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/installation/linux#ffmpeg-installation

Is there a reason you can’t have root on your VPS? Maybe you could ask to have Jellyfin and ffmpeg installed by an admin?

If your willing to try it, you could unpack the .deb file with dpkg -x <jellyfin-ffmpeg-for-your-distro.deb> <unpack dir> and stick the resulting directory (directories?) in Jellyfin’s PATH, but I’ve never tried this myself and I don’t know how well this could work.