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.
Their website is still free and every legal way to watch movies already includes subtitles.
nark
Do they include subtitles for every language?
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.
Oh, no harm done then, lets keep allowing every online resource to implement shitty money grabbing tactics
It sucks, sure. But it’s been free for a really long time, and it costs money to run a service.
You can’t really expect that a service will serve an increasing amount of people free stuff forever.
At least making people visit the site will encourage them to upload and help keep the service up.
Btw, it’s not expensive and if you think it is. Just use some other service.
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 yearA 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.
News has never historically been free, only recently through the web and founded by ads.
True, but just look at how much better it has gotten in the last couple decades. Putting the news behind the paywall runs the risk of ending the battle for impressions and might force nuance into well researched stories.
True. I amended my comment to better convey my anger
How much money do you think they would have made if they gave away all their content for free.
News is pretty expensive.
You’ve never heard of broadcast radio or TV?
Lots of ads
Edit: also tv news is also a new concept.
nothing should ever be better than it was in the past. everything should continue to suck forever.
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.They did do donations but maybe it wasn’t enough 🤷 https://blog.opensubtitles.com/opensubtitles/thank-you-for-donations
It wouldn’t surprise me if “VIP” was originally a tier given for donations which had some benefits.
Edit: that’s indeed the case https://blog.opensubtitles.com/opensubtitles/free-vip-membership-for-first-20-users
Do they have a transparent budget on how the donations are used? Anyone can claim the donations weren’t enough to survive.
But it’s been free for a really long time
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.
You talk like they are owned by some huge corporation and this was their plan from the beginning.
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.
I don’t know who they are but it’s quite evident that they at least we’re a very small group in the beginning.
I also haven’t seen any evidence that there is an evil corpo controlling them or something.
Occam’s razor
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.
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.
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.
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.
My favorite are the ones advertising shit for illuminati. Like yeah we all know
If you need to advertise your secret society, it’s not a good secret society.
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…
Finally: ClosedSubtitles
EDIT: Also, MAN, a lot of straight up bootlicking in this thread. What the fuck kind of pirates are you? lmao
How long have you been waiting?
He had a mission and he accomplished it… Kudos
Closed Caption
ClosedSubtitles, ClosedAI…
If you’re looking for an alternative, I’ve had luck with https://subscene.com/
I don’t really know what the best or most popular website is because this one has never really led me astray. That said, I don’t need to use them too often, so your mileage may vary.
They all seem to have pretty much the same subs one may have more niche stuff than others but that’s about it
Am I the only one for whom "open"subtitles.org hasn’t worked in years? I literally cannot find the download button, like in those okboomer memes. Never used the API. Switched to subscene.com and haven’t had problems since.
Excellent so now they’ll be paying volunteers for their work!
Wht happens when you have a nated IP?
University dorms certainly never needed subtitles!
My isp does this
Finally, even OpenSubtitles gets enshittified.
Making a burner account isnt that hard and hardly a shittification in my books.
Just a measure to ensure the free api access is correctly monetized which is a valid reason for a service to me.Would you work for free for your workplace without a compensation beyond a $5 bill and a pat on the back at times because your boss felt generous?
Opensubtitles does not create the subtitles, that’s done by the community, which is being monetised and sub authors get nothing out of it.
I agree, that that’s a bad part of it.
But we come a bit full circle here:
OpenSubs pays for the server and availability and service speed.
I assume the speed they provide ain’t the cheapest server they could get their hands on.
If the cost of a free/unauthenticated users and the server bill breaks even with the VIP payment (cant call it a donation imo) then they should have all the rights to limit free users.Now if they actively lock features, then I have no feelings for them.
Every service that disabled or limited the API has seen an increase in running costs, because people turn to scraping, which costs them more resources overall, and cannot be controlled by the site owners as easily.
Let’s be honest, though, hosting text files with a search bar isn’t that much expensive to justify a response like this.
It’s fine if they want to earn money, but then they should be upfront about it, and not making up stories about fluke running costs. I’d rather see a donation button.
Totally valid and agree with your stance.
But I feel like business decision in these times are rarely backed by good reasoning beyond quick cash and seldom long term thinking. So good job OpenSubs? Yay?
Would you work for free for your workplace without a compensation beyond a $5 bill and a pat on the back at times because your boss felt generous?
Misleading question. These kinds of communities are volunteer-fed, so you are basically asking me if I would work for free for a charity, which is the point. Things change notoriously when the boss then decides to monetize the entire thing for themself and not for you.
Well yes.
I go with the 2nd view because IMO the first option barely applies anymore with the current business course and decision.
man, they’ve change so much since 2017, where they were giving VIP membership out for free as a Christmas gift. Now they’re making it so can’t access the API for free anymore as a Christmas gift to themselves lmao
Now they’re making it so can’t access the API for free anymore
No, they’re not.
They are switching from the old API to the new API. You can pay to continue using the old one, use the new one for free (max 5 downloads per day), or pay for less-restricted access to the new API.
5 downloads a day is pretty generous as I used them four times in my life for my pirated movies.
But they offer a new API. Any disadvantages with the new one?
I didn’t see anything about it being free. I also didn’t pick up on whether or not it was moving behind a paywall, just that you could buy a vip subscription for 20% off
I think in the email they sent out they mentioned that each IP would be able to download 5 per 24 hours and “registered users” 10 per 24 hours. Paid members would be restricted to 1,000 per 24 hours.
It’s 15 bucks a year for VIP, if I understood it correctly, then I am of the opinion there is nothing here to get mad about for “regular users”.
I can download ten subtitles just trying to find one good one for a single TV show episode
Imo if they want to be so strict with downloading subtitles, they should raise the quality standards for the subtitles that are submitted.
I believe the captions submitters are doing so for free, no?
Yes that doesn’t mean that opensubtitles can’t take their new found savings and use it to weed out poor quality submissions.
Wikipedia editors do it for free and yet they still maintain a high standard of quality.
Free trash is still trash.
Honestly that’s a fair point too.
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.
https://opensubtitles.stoplight.io/docs/opensubtitles-api/e3750fd63a100-getting-started
Huh… weird. I can’t visit ClosedSubtitles.org.
I guess this would also affect stremio’s opensubtitles addons
Good thing Stremio has other options… And most media have their own embedded subtitles, which ends up being the best case scenario.
What I don’t recall is if we can login in Open Subtitles 🤔
We can’t and the addon doesn’t seem to be open source, I could modify it to let us login
Let’s hope this gets sorted out in the future, I remember some addon let you out your login credentials maybe not the official one 🤔
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This transition aims to pave the way for a more advanced and streamlined experience with the introduction of the new REST API on OpenSubtitles.com
You didn’t even took the time to read the first lines
For whatever reason, the opensubtitles.com plugin for Kodi still doesn’t require login and still appears to download whatever I need.
For now.
edit: after checking their “support us” page, it appears it’s because of the “anonymous” tier, limited to 10 dls per day.
Good enough for me.
Try actually reading the article.
Try sucking my ass.
I did, it includes none of the information you posted regarding non-VIP accounts.
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Yes, I know this already, and the API docs provide different info than the screencap from opensubtitles.com (which the blogpost is about transferring accounts to from opensubtitles.org), so being a douche about anyone not being clear on things from reading any of that, much less reading just the blogpost, was uncalled for.
5,719,123 subtitles from opensubtitles.org
Wanted to search the text of every subtitle
Bless the data hoarders
The link is not loading
you da mvp!
Thanks! But I just found the former redditor/data hoarder who did all the real work.
Still, very much appreciated by us deafies!
That only solves half the issue. The other half is everything released after the change.
They just need a paid account and they can keep appending to it.
"Open"subtitles has like a 1k dowload/day limit, which should cover most media.
Hope you’re right, but there’s a lot of stuff released in a day, and you have to consider all the other languages. They’ll need a couple at least.
*its previous API
