Exciting news for who? Only the site owner is excited that a free resource now requires a subscription
“Yay! Now I have to pay another subscription! I’m so excited! Let’s celebrate with them!” - nobody
Gather all the worlds subtitles under the guise of being “open” and then bait and switch when you’re the largest subtitles database out there.
The free API had a limit of 20 subs/day, you’re not going to tell me those server costs were significant.
Gather all the worlds subtitles under the guise of being “open” and then bait and switch when you’re the largest subtitles database out there.
MS did something similiar 2007 already.
The new API has the exact same free limit. They’re just dropping support for the old API soon and people who want to depend on the old version will need to pay for its continued support because they want to push everyone onto the new site/API
Yea OP should update the post. OS did a horrible job communicating but its not as dire as the title projects.
I think it goes from 20 to 5. 10 if you’re not anonymous. To get more you need to have contributed to the site, monetarily or other wise.
The minimum for anonymous is 10/day. If you sign up and do nothing else it’s 20.
If you sign up and upload a single file it goes to 50. If you upload 51 subtitles it’s 100. If you upload 101 or more it goes to 200, and if you upload 1001 it goes up to 300.
If you pay $15/year it’s 1000
That’s good to know, thanks for the link.
The API documentation needs to be updated.
This is still reasonable IMO, unless people are binge watching a Netflix release in the entire day they can wait for the next day to download subs.
then they utterly failed to communicate that lol
It doesn’t say the new API costs money, though. It just says the old API requires VIP for people that can’t switch to the new API…
And yeah sure, server costs and all. OTOH, subtitle files are tiny, so there’s only so much money you can ask for it realistically.
I bet they can put all the subtitles of every movie and show in history on a single 10TB hard drive.
And what does that matter? Millions of requests cost
They ask for $15/year. Cheaper than Nintendo Switch Online
If nobody gives them money, they’ll revert back… But people will give them money, so they won’t.
But the new api is still free, you just have to pay if you want to use the legacy api. This makes sense to get people to switch without requiring them to do it super fast
People were already giving money before this change…
You just have to move to the new API which is still free, the old one is temporarily still available by paying
Yeah he said the new one is REST… Does that mean the current one is SOAP or something? Yikes
Looks like xmlrpc. The website for this spec no longer exists, so I definitely see a motivation to stop using it, lol.
https://trac.opensubtitles.org/projects/opensubtitles/wiki/XMLRPC
haha
Yarr, this be objectionable, but inconsequential.
Unless you’re deaf or hard of hearing.
In which case the ADA provides extensive coverage that demands reasonable accommodations. Hence why reddit backtracked and allowed a few apps free API access (eg RedReader, which is very clunky but still works).
ADA… extensive coverage? I see you haven’t ever tried to get a reasonable accommodation.
Extensive =/= perfect. At least there’s a chance of getting reasonable accommodation. With sex discrimination there’s almost no hope outside of employment.
Also I’m sure you’re speaking with a dollop of hyberbole and overlooking a bunch of accommodation provided up front.
Site owner and whomever in marketing wrote that. Pure psychopathy, IMO.
Wait… “Ad-Free Subtitles”? I have never even used or heard of this service, but that just feels like an “insult to injury” or “annoy you into paying” abuse? Am I wrong?
Please tell me that this is not some auto-subtitling service that is going to cause ads to be inserted into the subtitles for other ads or something? Like, how do ads in subtitles even work?
They add one ad at the beginning like “visit example.com” inside the subtitle file
But luckily there aren’t many companies that want to be associated with piracy* so in most cases it’s blank a generic “advertise here contact mail@example.com”
I remember only a campaign that lasted over a year, a service that promotes legal streaming services, filmamo.it
* note: why I said “associated with piracy”: those files are going to be used with pirated video files and in most cases are pirated too as they’ve been extracted from a DVD or a streaming service without a license from the copyright holders. Once I saw a guide “how to use external subs with Netflix” for the rare edge cases where the viewer is watching a content via VPN and his sub language is missing, but those are very rare. Not to mention that for MPAA there’s no difference between just torrenting a movie or paying a subscription to Netflix in another country via VPN: for them is all piracy and they want to stop both.
Fucking MPAA. Quite possibly the most corrupt pile of dickheads to ever assemble. They blatantly ignored their own raring guidelines for decades until they decided they got tired of being called out on it and changed them to be so vague that they would he allowed to justify any rating, then started accepting “donations” from production companies to get the ratings they wanted.
It’s not auto-subtitling, I checked. But that is a different thing they made (without the ad inserting part). It’s at https://ai.opensubtitles.com/
You should tip them too!
Like your landlord
What really caught my attention was OpenSubtitles going from a .org to a .com domain.
So it’s a regular business now?
Always has been. I’ve no clue why they got hold of an org domain. At first they were more like early years wikipedia. Today most subtitles don’t sink with almost any release and their hashes are inconsistent.
https://forum.opensubtitles.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=18389
what about vlc player?
And Plex?
I have no skin in this game but I think it sounds like they need to change their name from “open subtitles” to “closed captioning”
Edit: stupid STT
Eyyyyyy got em
Lol gotta pay for “adfree subtitles”
“Luke, I am [over the moon for these Sobeys™️ rebates!]”
Reminds me of The Truman Show
Reminds me of another website that rhymes with schmedddit
Creddit
HOLY SHIT! 12 whole dollars a YEAR to keep using the deprecated API they don’t want to support anymore. What monsters.
I had issues in the past with opensubtitles serving malware through fake download buttons on the site.
You had like 6 different buttons to download with only one legit.
Sent them an email and they removed them…
I hardly trust this site and really don’t appreciate they use open in their name and pull up shit like this.
I wish we had some sort of P2P sub hosting… So we don’t have to deal with sites like opensubtitles.
I have used Subscene (for movies) and addic7ed (for tv shows) without any issues for years.
Well, the fake download buttons that give you malware is all part of the experience. This very email continues later with this:
Unlike non-VIP users, who might face offers, installers, and redirects before accessing subtitles, VIP members have a streamlined and hassle-free download experience.
Should just have a drive link to a trove of SRT files.
It’s $15/year. Not exactly breaking the bank.
So what pisses me off in these cases is this: they didn’t contribute with the data. They’re a convenient aggregator, I give them that, but the data came from third parties. If you want to start charging for convenient access to the data you should at least make all data before you started charging available in a bulk download for free.
They aren’t charging for convenient access to the data though, they are charging for bulk access. The limitations of the new API should not impact people casually pulling in subtitles with VLC when they watch a movie, which is the purpose the API was intended to fulfill.
They’re just doing what discogs did with music. They’ll create contracts with media companies to allow them to claim that all the info in their DB is copyrighted. Eventhough most of it was user created, it is technically mostly copyrighted data. And then they’ll start the legal campaigns to eliminate any competition. They’ll progressively make it more difficult to access and more difficult to update or get things corrected and it will become frustratingly bad but the only game in town.
You just need to move to the new API, which is free, the old one is still available temporarily if you pay
It says one is not able to use the new API for all scenarios
Yeah but the basic “give me my subtitles for this specific movie” very likely still works just fine, because… that’s like the whole reason they exist
So… They’re following the Reddit business model? Let’s see how that works out.
Don’t call yourself open ffs
openAI anyone?
ClosedAI
