As far as I understand they are shutting down open subtitles.org API, but the jellyfin plugin uses the .com version. The free account there is limited to 20 downloads per day via API
People are getting the their pitchforks out but I think they are misunderstanding. Opensubtitles.ORG is being replaced by opensubtitles.COM. They just are stopping access to the ORG website. I have already migrated to the COM website for a while. And a 20 downloads/a day limit for free users is very reasonable.
Is it? It’s a simple text file, the download costs them close to nothing. 20 subtitles per day is laughable, especially because other people make the subtitles.
Bandwidth and hosting still cost money, period. And why would 20 be laughable? What would be okay by your book? 50? 100? 1000? 20 per day is fine for most users, how much content are you downloading every single day that it wouldn’t be?
“Subtitles downloaded by VIP members are free from any embedded ads, offering a cleaner viewing experience.”
I haven’t used opensubtitles much but have been considering setting up bazarr, using a source that embeds ads in subtitles would be a non starter for me.
I would even be totally willing to pay for increased download limits but not if it means supporting putting ads in the free subtitles.
I use bazarr in combination with a vip membership of opensubtitles. I’ve been doing this for years since they have been adding ads in them for multiple years. Messages like “This subtitle was downloaded from” are also removed.
My wife is deaf, and I take this VERY fucking personally. This is predatory to an already (unfortunately) overlooked demographic of movie lovers, I will absolutely rally against this bullshit.
Why do you take this personally? Just use opensubtitles.com instead of their old opensubtitles.org?
They are only changing the old .org API, because they are moving on to their new website and REST API that they’ve been working on for a while. The new REST API is still free for 5-10 subtitle downloads a day.
Lost me right here. Personally I’m not ever going to pay for a service where the work done by volunteer users, for free, is filling some random person’s pockets. An argument can’t even be made a la RedHat here - there’s literally no value being added to the volunteers’ work by OpenSubtitles…
OpenSubtitles literally has pulled a shXtter here IMO
I’m paying for the fact it’s popular with submitters so has the most subs available (this could change with the recent announcement, we’ll see) and an API that allows automated download of subtitles including matching of the scene file that is being played, supported by Jellyfin/Plex.
Is there another, free, as popular resource with an API? If so, please share.
What about infrastructure costs? Are you comfortable making someone else pay for your access? What about the design and implementation of the API? Should all software be free?
Please note that I’m not trying to support this decision at all. I personally feel like API access is similar to SSO for enterprise stuff (check out sso.tax). I also feel like there should be some level of compensation and even profit so people can focus on building stuff like this. It’s really hard to define what that is, especially without transparent costs, which I don’t believe OpenSubtitles shares? Also they use super predatory ads so I don’t think they have any high ground to even suggest what I’m talking about.
They host incredibly tiny text files. We are talking in the single KB range. Even serving millions of these a day is minor load to current hosting environments.
Most modern webpages load the equivalent of 1000s of subtitles to every user on every page load, including small sites like personal blogs.
I would be surprised if their hosting costs were even in the $1000s/month instead of $100s.
Thats the likely reason they don’t share the costs. It’s that cheap to run. Even asking for donations might be pushing it. Demanding payment? Bullshit.
No work? They host, maintain and provide access to a massive catalogue of subtitles providing metadata needed for matching media to subs and up until recently we’re giving free access to everyone. Might I suggest if you care about your wife’s access to subtitled movies this much that maybe you should buy the 10 euro per year subscription for her to help keep the platform alive? Alternatively you can find a subtitles group that does all this for free and choose to solely download their subs (also I assume donating to them since you’re so appreciative of their work).
Does anyone know which scenes are best for subtitles. I hate watching a movie and there is a foreign language and I know there’s supposed to be text on the screen but I get nada. I have to use context clues.
They often do not include many languages, sure if you want English subtitles it’s likely they will be there. But good luck getting subtitles for movies and shows that didn’t have an official in the given country.
Accessibility features are already scarce and paywalling them seems to be a trend that’s going on, like how reddit closed it’s API so blind users couldn’t even use it anymore. The /r/blind subreddit needed non-blind mods because their native app doesn’t support accessibility.
How… how could you possibly start trying to profit off of a major resource for accessibility to movies. That’s scummier than scummy. Fuck you OpenSubtitles, you’re the fucking Elon Musk and Steve Huffman of deaf people everywhere. Get absolutely fucked.
It’s often more comprehensive than what opensubtitles have to offer. I often struggle to get tv episodes with subs in my native language, but all the streaming services obviously has it.
Of course it has. You need to offer the world a useful service for some length of time before you have dominated the market to such an extent that you can cut the quality and jack up the prices without there being any meaningful competition to worry about.
So who exactly does own OpenSubtitles Group Limited, and what are their motivations? If you're claiming to know, I assume you must be some kind of insider? Because they don't seem to be all that open about it. Otherwise we can only judge by their actions.
This unfortunately helps sets a precedent for what the internet is going to look like in the future. Even the most basic things will be behind a paywall.
You cant even read a fucking news article from New York Times, who made 173.91 million dollars last year
I don’t know what is so controversial about this statement. Investigative reporting is fucking expensive. The people who do it need to eat. If you’re not paying for it, who is?
Tv news is a relatively new development and TV news is entirely founded by ads and as a way to drive viewers to a channel to keep them for other programmes.
A lot of things are already like that. IIUC this is restrictions on the API not the subs themselves. If you’d like you can still go to the site to download specific subs. What you can’t do is use bazarr to bulk download subs. Personally I bought vip since I found the free tier API limit pretty bad and I didn’t think the price was so bad for what you get back. Feel free to disagree tho. Before I automated my setup I was just manually searching for subs for movies I wanted and that worked pretty well and will continue to do so if you’d prefer that.
THEN ASK PEOPLE TO DONATE, how tone-deaf can you be about your own community?? What the fuck do they think Wikipedia is doing?
I’ve found pirates & FOSS enthusiasts are FAR more likely to donate into something they use regularly and appreciate, this is a blatant slap in the face to those people.
I swear I read a thread here (on lemmy) recently that one of these subtitle sites was embedding ads in the subtitles. Now that takes things even further than scummier in my opinion, especially since subtitles are for availability.
Correct. They now embed ads directly into the subtitles. There is a python program to strip those ads out, but doesn’t work with Plex directly. It can be setup with bazarr, but that requires sonarr and or radar…
I mean I’ve been a pirate for a WHILE and you generally do see ads on opensubtitles subs. Generally it’s opensubtitles saying you can advertise with them, or credits for subtitles that stay on the screen for way too long, but this has been a thing forever now, I don’t recall a time when this wasn’t done.
I don’t think I can take the moral high ground on it seeing as…well, I am a pirate lol. We out here doing our best to stay afloat, opensubtitles included.
TBH it’s just simple text files, you can open any .srt with Notepad and edit it to your liking. I always remove those dumb ads at the beginning and the end.
So frustrating when a subtitle ad pops up spoiling that a movie is ending.
Something dramatic happening on screen and then “you can advertise on opensubtitles” appears on the bottom letting you know that there is 10 seconds left and spoiling any tension or drama in the scene.
Idk where you read that. In the article, if you click to read about their new REST API:
Your consumer can query the API on its own, and download 5 subtitles per IP’s per 24 hours, but a user must be authenticated to download more. Users will then be able to download as many subtitles as their ranks allows, from 10 as simple signed up user, to 1000 for VIP user.
See, I get when YouTube or some such are asking for some kind of payment, since transcoding and delivering all those large video files is expensive as fuck. Yet, Open subtitles delivers text. Fucking. Text. The rest is done for them for free by the users. No, folks. You ain't getting any money.
Many pirates will pay for newsgroup access. People also pay for hard drive space, power for servers, hardware, etc. Pirating doesn’t mean people are never paying for anything. That said, I won’t pay for subtitles. I’ll just wait til the community figures something else out.
You have to set your username/password in the opensubtitle plugin, then you can download the subtitles for an episode directly through the UI (right click on episode and “edit subtitles”). You can also change the setting so that it automatically download subtitles for your language for every media that does not come with ones.
BUT I don’t know for how long will this work, since the new policy
This will just create new competition for them. I have been watching anime for several years and never once had to go through opensubtitles. Most releases now have the subtitles integrated so what is the value they bring to the whole thing?
Edit: I just realized I’m replying the one an only db0, you are the best, cheers!
I use it primarily because the embedded subs are often in vubsub which fucking sucks and can’t be played probably on some devices, they also don’t scale probably.
Anime is a different culture. Most non-anime stuff doesn’t have them embedded (especially the old stuff) and it’s still useful for finding subtitles for other languages
And ancestry dot com. That one still chaps my ass. My mom spent so much time in there adding in her work, and they just fucking locked it one day behind a paywall. Fuck these sites that just take the users hard work and then try and profit off it without announcing that from the get go.
I always assume that. My mom was getting up there in age, and just having a fun time entering in her work. She had no clue that would happen, until it did.
Textbook shooting yourself in the foot, I really don’t know what they were hoping to gain. You already had a long-lasting reputation in the online community, now you’re a fucking scab
IDK, if I was contributing subtitles for an open provider free of charge who shared them free of charge, I’d be glad my subtitles were helping people who needed them. Now that labor has been turned into capital and that rug has been pulled with no back-dated compensation or provisions for free subtitles for hard of hearing or something. It’s a shitty move across the board for everyone but the owner.
I would hardly consider ‘power users’ the ones who download via the API. I used to download them via BSPlayer, where it will prompt you in a nice user friendly interface if you needed subtitles for whatever you were watching. Well, that used the old OpenSubtitles API, and now that it’s gone it’s not gonna work anymore
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