Saying Goodbye to OpenSubtitles.org API | Hacker News Reader

Saying Goodbye to OpenSubtitles.org API

blog.opensubtitles.com

176 pointsaresende156 comments

> 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.

> If you wish to offer subtitles without prompting for an opensubtitles account, please contact us and tell us about your project... For an easier development process, you can set your consumer as "Under Development", this will allow you to perform up to 100 downloads per day without user authentication temporarly. [1]

Downloading tiers are listed at [2].

It's a question I've never considered before -- should "open" mean "you can API-download everything all the time anonymously no limits", or "you're free to API-download a reasonable amount for consumer purposes with an account, and the more you upload the more you can download"?

Do they offer any kind of bulk download or mirror?

[1] https://opensubtitles.stoplight.io/docs/opensubtitles-api/e3...

[2] https://www.opensubtitles.com/en/support_us/

Like some open source projects moving to a "source available" or "fair code" licenses, it is going to be bumpy finding equilibrium as to what is reasonable. Tragedy of the commons for sure. There are costs to cover, and usage profiles can vary wildly.

And when they do that people just fork and go along with their own. Tofu being a great example, opensearch somewhat less.

By “people” you mean organizations with budgets and stakeholders.

Very few people, even few programmers, would be able to take on maintaining complicated software like tofu alone, for example.

More like Reddit. The contributors will just leave and you'll be left with a corpse of content to rip going forward. Tofu is different because of the broad contributor base around the Terraform ecosystem. Lots of people's jobs (or companies even, Spacelift for example) depend on Tofu not only existing, but improving into the future.

If you have a benevolent dictator with deep pockets, throttling usage and retrieval is less of a concern. The Internet Archive comes to mind, as does Wikipedia. Reddit's outcome happened because they were a discussion board utility masquerading as a 10-100x VC funded business, and their actions drove away the concentration of mods and contributors who were putting in all the free work (broadly speaking).

Did anybody (outside of the tech/HN open-source-die-hard bubble) actually leave Reddit?

From what I saw, there were protests which most Redit users barely noticed (the front-page just served content from the subreddits that didn't go private), and then there was nothing. The long-term impact seems to be small to nonexistent.

Maybe if the users organized better and started posting "brand unsafe" content everywhere instead of just going dark, the effects (and especially the effects on advertisers and Reddit profitability) would have been different. One can dream, though.

Hard to say without Reddit showing their traffic cards, just anecdotal evidence. Admittedly, if you're consuming big subs similar to what you'd consume on Tiktok (r/funny, r/worldnews, etc), likely little impact to traffic. I know the mods from some of the subs I follow fled (admittedly smaller readership, r/econmonitor and r/machinelearning for example). Reddit will have to show their hand when they attempt to IPO, as they then tread into securities fraud territory if the metrics are not accurate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36289290 (Ask HN: Anyone at Reddit can confirm a traffic dip?)

(n=1, I consume Reddit now with a Lemmy mirror of the subs I'm interested in)

Is it easy to find Lemmy mirrors? I left reddit but haven't really replaced it.

https://lemmyverse.net/communities

https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances

https://github.com/mushroomlabs/fediverser

https://www.google.com/search?q=reddit+lemmy+mirrors+site%3A...

I'm addicted to the logged-out Reddit front page and I can tell you that besides a few subreddits committing suicide and being immediately replaced by similarly named subreddits that didn't care about the boycott, and a few days where more interesting content was getting surfaced when some big subs went dark, there has been absolutely zero noticeable effect on the average user experience.

I would be -shocked- if Reddit had data showing that the protest was more than a fart in the wind

Yes. The long-term impact of the quality of posts in interest subreddits is immediately noticeable and staggering. This is not even to speak of the moderators who are no longer participating.

For my feed, a ton of the NSFW subreddits went away, became so low quality that following them was pointless as the mods left or engagement dropped to ridiculous levels, even the OG big tankers.

r/gonewild for example has nominal 4.6 million subscribers - but among the default "hot" feed on the first page there's just four posts with > 500 karma, and on the 2nd page there's tons of posts with 80-120 karma. That's insanely low, back in ye olde days a simple boobie could easily hit 2k karma in a matter of hours, and there was pages and pages of highly upvoted content.

Now, I can't say whether this is a consequence of users leaving, mods leaving, Reddit manually downranking NSFW sub engagements, or the massive increase of ragebait redirecting attention and engagement - r/europe is filled with utterly vile comments on everything regarding immigration and Islam, r/therewasanattempt even managed to get geobanned in Germany because they put up the (banned) Hamas slogan on their banner [1].

(In the German Reddit sphere, it seems that additionally Reddit has created a ton of outright clones of popular English subs like AitA, DIY, legaladvice, ... that further remove engagement from the large subs and redirect it to the small new ones - this "pushing" of new subs likely also drives NSFW subs with low engagement down the feed)

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Israel/comments/17vqch7/rtherewasan...

I follow r/europe and I have also noticed a huge change. What once seemed to be a pretty open subreddit appears to have turned into exactly what you mentioned, with vile comments on immigration and Islam on almost every thread.

I did start to wonder if people's viewpoint on immigration has changed as the narrative that Europe is "saturated" with immigrants seems to be being pushed a lot at them moment, but I have a feeling that the audience of Reddit and r/europe seems to be changing. I wish there was some way to know for sure.

It's due to the extreme right wing and other opportunists fear mongering and inflaming people's grievances with an easy scapegoat that cannot defend itself.

Social media of all kinds are effective tools in this. Vilification of minorities works, it always has, but those who would exploit it haven't had access to the public forums required to promote it. Now they have.

Nuclear weapons won't destroy the earth, social media will.

I think a lot of Reddit's earlier userbase was more lefty types and that also overlaps with the group most annoyed by the API changes since they'd gotten used to what Reddit used to be. So more of the left wing users left, resulting in the attitude shift you're seeing. Even the right wing users on early reddit were more right-libertarian than right-conservative or alt-right initially - Ron Paul was one of the first political figures to have a big following there.

That said, there is also a shift to the right in real life, as seen by the rise of groups like AfD, Brothers of Italy or Sweden Democrats.

r/europe also has a bit of a weird history with this too. It started relatively left wing in the early days of reddit, drifting to the right until the mods started clamping down on the more overtly racist stuff. At this point, a lot of the posters involved moved to r/european, which sort of reset r/europe back leftward a bit again. But then r/european was banned around the same time as r/the_donald for much the same reasons, and those users drifted back into r/europe which shifted it to the right a second time.

The fact that a banner with the slogan "from the river to the sea" is banned in Germany speaks to the massive self-defeating overreaction by some parts of the West. This sort of thing is only promoting a spiral into a wider war.

It should also be noted that it's not a "Hamas slogan" but has a much wider use:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_river_to_the_sea

> The fact that a banner with the slogan "from the river to the sea" is banned in Germany speaks to the massive self-defeating overreaction by some parts of the West.

Germany, and Europe in general, has the cultural understanding (as a consequence of 1933-1945) that no, not all speech has to be allowed - particularly not when it calls for or supports terrorism.

And that is precisely the context in where this slogan is currently being used.

Do you mean because of use by the Israeli right wing (Likud) or by Hammas?

"Kill Jews" is clearly evil and should be banned, but banning this phrase ends up smearing ordinary Palestinians who use it to describe an non-violent aspiration, as did the Israelis.

As I said, an over-reaction.

I haven't left reddit, per se, but I browse it less and comment less. I doubt I'm alone. Unfortunately, there's not really a replacement for much of what it offered.

This is why I love technologies like BitTorrent and IPFS, where it's not a single server bearing the brunt and costs of being popular, everyone is contributing. The more popular it is, the more performant it is.

When I see "open" I read it as "I can do what I want with it". I don't read it as any obligation on the part of the provider/creator to incur ongoing costs on my behalf.

"Open" as in "open beer", so to speak.

As in, “Going stale pretty soon“, you mean?

Looks like they offer a full data dump: https://dl.opensubtitles.org/addons/export/

I haven't actually tried to use it. So long as they offer a dump you could use I think it's entirely reasonable to require payment for the API.

I think it's reasonable to consider them morally open even if the web UI is closed source if the subtitles are open. It feels to me like a project selling a shiny hosted app around an open source project. I think in this sort of project the core "source" is the subtitles, not the web UI.

If OpenAI let you download their models but didn't provide the tooling you'd need to run them I think their name would be much more reasonable.

That's not a full dump of subtitles, but rather of list of which subtitles they have, with download links. Here are the first lines of the `subtitles_all.txt` file:

    IDSubtitle MovieName MovieYear LanguageName ISO639 SubAddDate ImdbID SubFormat SubSumCD MovieReleaseName MovieFPS SeriesSeason SeriesEpisode SeriesIMDBParent MovieKind URL
    1 Alien3 1992 English en 2004-10-31 23:54:23 103644 sub 2  Alien.3 11.000 0 0 0 movie http://www.opensubtitles.org/subtitles/1/alien3-en
    2 Identity 2003 Slovenian sl 2004-10-31 23:54:23 309698 sub 1  Identity.DVDRiP.XViD 0.000 0 0 0 movie http://www.opensubtitles.org/subtitles/2/identity-sl
    3 Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence 2004 English en 2004-10-31 23:54:23 347246 srt 1  Innocence.2004.DVDRip.XviD 23.980 0 0 0 movie http://www.opensubtitles.org/subtitles/3/ghost-in-the-shell-2-innocence-en

Yeah, I was wondering if that could be the full dump. I know how far compression algorithms have come, but 318MB for all the subtitles of the world? Would be interesting to know though how large a full dump would be.

My guess is not by much. Text doesn't require a lot of storage. After looking at a few random files my estimate is that the size of the full compressed dump would be about 30x (~10 GB)

EleutherAI cleaned an OpenSubtitles dataset that was 12.98GiB (13.9GB).

https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00027

https://lifearchitect.ai/whats-in-my-ai/

"Open" means if you already have a copy, you are free to share it as you like. It doesn't mean someone is obligated to spend money giving it to you. The FSF always charged a profit rate on Emacs tapes.

I feel like every time something has started with the name “Open”, the promise that lured people in (sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit) has been broken.

Open Exchange Rates: the fact that you didn’t need an API key was an important part of their gaining popularity. Of course, this fell down at some point, at least partly due to stupidly-coded clients, and so they started requiring an API key, and completely hobbled the free plan for many previously-recommended uses (only hourly updates and 1,000 requests per month; a month is up to 744 hours, so they really are just saying “if you want to use this broadly, either pay us $97/month, or cache it yourself hourly, proxying it if you have multiple access points”). Not very open.

OpenAI: eh, you probably already know the story. They broke their word and premise thoroughly.

> It's a question I've never considered before -- should "open" mean "you can API-download everything all the time anonymously no limits", or "you're free to API-download a reasonable amount for consumer purposes with an account, and the more you upload the more you can download"?

Neither, Open should mean that the resources are publicly licensed such that they can be freely rehosted or redistributed. It should mean that the resources are owned by the community rather than the website operator, and that the website should be selling coordination, not access.

Whether or not there's an API limit is irrelevant provided that:

A) the website does not claim ownership over resources it hosts

B) the website is not going to go after people hosting or distributing those resources outside of the site -- ie, users have explicit permission to distribute any and all of the subtitle content on the site

C) there is a way to get the resources off of the site, ie it's not impossible for someone to set up a rehost.

If OpenSubtitles still allows a bulk download or has a mirror, then honestly I don't see a problem with them making this change -- I'm not a fan of it, but if the subtitles are still downloadable in bulk and if OpenSubtitles isn't claiming ownership and would have no issue with someone setting up a separate service or rehosting those subtitles and if (to the degree they can be licensed openly, given that they're subtitles of copyrighted films) they are licensed openly using an OSI-compatible or comparable license in the case of the GPL, then I don't have a problem with them using the word "Open" and I think it still applies.

Having said that, I can't immediately find any information on their website about what copyrights they do or don't try to claim, and it's not clear to me how I would go about building a full dump of the content (a sibling mentions a dump but that it doesn't contain the full subtitles). But that would be my bigger beef. I'm less concerned about whether the website is Open and I'm more concerned about whether the subtitles are Open (again, as open as movie subtitles can be).

Exactly. Open doesn't mean "we will pay all of the bills so that you can enjoy these resources for free".

Open means "we will not take any legal action against sharing and/or modifying these files".

Open projects can have all the ratelimits and paid APIs that they want, as long as they are okay with people setting up mirrors and re-hosting content for free.

And notably there are some "open" services like Doesthedogdie that should not be considered Open even though as far as I know they don't have rate limits on their APIs or force users to log in. They still claim ownership of all of the content, you don't have permission to take that info and mirror it to another site.

Goodreads also springs to mind (although I guess Amazon has started monetizing that now, so it might not be as great of an example). The immediate access matters less to me than Amazon looking at all those user reviews and recommendations and saying, "we own them."

In an age of companies looking to cash in wherever they can on AI plays based on free data, tiers start to make sense to keep the services viable.

For consumers with normal usage, on-demand downloading of subtitles for 5 movies in a day seems pretty good. For TV, not so much. Even rate limits would be fine. A movie can be downloaded every hour, a TV show every 15 minutes.

For a media server that wants a local cache of the subtitles, it could still run through with those rate limits in the background while you’re not watching. It could be a slight annoyance when first setting it up, but would be a one time thing and not much of an issue for one-off adds over time.

I was messing around to mass download stuff from a wallpaper site with an API about a year ago, just because I’m a data hoarder and was worried about it going away at some point. The API required auth and had a rate limit, but as a consumer, it was fine. I just added in a 2 second wait between downloads and had no issues. It took longer, but what do I care? After a week of screwing around with it I saw I downloaded about 50gb of wallpapers, which was more than I wanted. I felt kind of bad about it and stopped. I decided to be a bit more intentional on my downloads after that. The tool I made let me put it a tag and download all the results. That was a bit too greedy.

Am I wrong that a script is copyrighted and thus charging for it, something they have no right to distribute, opens them to all sorts of potential legal action?

It’s a lot easier to look the other way when it’s free.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/fan-made-subtitl... (2017)

Yes you are wrong because a movie script and movie subs are not the same thing at all

In what way? The subs are the script (often translated) + timestamps. It’s the definition of a derivative work.

The subs wouldn’t exist without the original work.

Edit: Yes, it’s a subset of the script and not thee script itself, and being a pedant about that isn’t a useful point. It’s just pedantic.

Subs are not the script, they are a transcription of the finished work.

That’s just nitpicking. Even by your definition it’s a derivative work, and regardless then it’s just a translation of a subset of the script.

It is not nitpicking, it is an important distinction.

No part of the distinction is important. It's a subset.

Imagining I were to hand you a book. It's Harry Potter but missing every third sentence. You tell me "It's Harry Potter" and I'm like "nuh uh", I'd be just being a pedantic ass and not making a good point.

Script has more content (eg visuals, setting, mood, directions) - subtitles are just the noises.

If I tried to sell a novel with parts missing and translated, I’d still get in legal trouble.

If you tried to sell a translation of all the dialogue that was explicitly intended to be used with a legally purchased copy of the novel (don't ask me how, it's not my metaphor), I'm not sure you would.

But reading the script to a Simpsons episode doesn't replace actually watching the Simpsons episode.

Similarly, I might pay for a subscription to a website which has a detailed review of that episode along with screenshots. Neither replace watching it, not even close.

I do think that subs are a little bit more legally ambiguous than a review but I think you could make a reasonable argument that they're a fair use under US copyright law.

The script has its own separate copyright distinct from the full episode just like how lyrics and musical compositions have separate copyrights from a specific recording of a song.

People were writing movie scripts long before the talkies became popular :-)

Movie scripts contain much more than the dialogues. There's enough of an argument to be made that transcription is covered by fair use rights.

Scripts include things such as "Character X does Y" and "Z event happens". Subtitles are more like a transcript or written down song lyrics.

Arent' song lyrics also under copyright? Or is this depending on the country and their definition of intellectual property?

I doubt they are under copyright, if they were, cover bands or bands making covers of songs would be getting sued willy nilly.

Cover bands pay royalties to avoid getting sued.

Yes, song lyrics are very copyrighted. Most of the sites you see online offering lyrics are paying licensing fees to a stack of different rights agencies.

source: I worked in the music biz

"Script" in the movie/tv world has a specific meaning, and is very different from what the subtitles are. Subtitles are just dialog, while the script contains so much more.

Calling the subtitles "basically a script" is like saying JavaScript is basically Java.

Subtitles are sometimes truncated/edited to get them to fit on screen at a readable line length

Things like [ominous music plays] are not part of the script at all, but featured in subtitles

It's definitely a tricky fair use case, and obviously will depend on each country.

IANAL but I'd say the main argument for it being free use is that subtitles don't take away from movie/TV sales. There's no harm. To the contrary -- fan-made subtitles in languages the studio didn't produce might generate purchases where there were none before.

While the main argument against it is that it's part of and enables broader piracy -- if you can show that people are overwhelmingly using subtitles with content they downloaded illegally, then it is part of harming the studios.

(Also, subtitles are not scripts. They usually don't even indicate who's speaking, much less include all of the scene descriptions and instructions. Probably ~half the words in a script are not dialog.)

i don't follow that argumentation.

do you think that people who want subtitles would pay for content if there were no subtitles available for it?

subtitles either increase sales, or they do nothing. they may increase illegitimate sharing, but they won't do it at the expense of sales.

> do you think that people who want subtitles would pay for content if there were no subtitles available for it?

Pretty much. If you're Japanese and don't speak English, and a show you really want to watch is only available to pirate in English (no subtitles available) which means you can't understand it, but if you subscribe to Netflix you can watch it with Japanese subtitles that Netflix provides... I mean yeah?

I'm presenting both sides of the argument. The question is really, which side will a court find to be stronger? And there may very well be a distinction here between fan-made subtitle translations, versus official subtitles.

ok, i was thinking of content that didn't have official subtitles.

I mean, lets not pretend that it's primary use case isn't to provide subtitles for pirated content.

Sure, but I don't know a single pirate that decided to purchase media because subtitles were made unavailable.

I've done it - twice, I think. Downloaded a film in a foreign language, couldn't find subs anywhere.

I've done it zero and most of the people I know that pirate are also at 0.

Like all things in life, YMMV. ;)

There are also wrinkles in the distinctions between subtitles and captions, definitions of accessibility, the application of accessibility to fair use (and related restrictions on distribution), the definition or existence of fair-use exceptions in different jurisdictions, and on and on.

The bottom line is that most of these points haven't been challenged outside of that BREIN case, nor do they cover some of the more valuable uses of authored or revised subtitles, such as subtitling and captioning works that never had them, or in languages that weren't translated, or to correct significant translation errors.

The legal cases of subtitling are especially pertinent now that we have relatively accurate, low-cost, easy to implement realtime speech-to-text. If many devices that play video can now add subtitles, or even captions, locally in real time, how much value is there in paying lawyers to pursue cases to protect the copyright of _just_ the subtitles? Is editing a subtitle script generated by a speech-to-text engine also a copyright violation, and if so, who all is violating the copyright? The person who feeds the video to the engine? The editor, who could be a different person? The distributor of the resulting subtitle file?

> realtime speech-to-text

Oh boy. I mean, I frequently rewind turn on subtitles for 10 seconds because a bit of dialog is totally unintelligible. (Or it turns out to be perfectly intelligible but it's something with a proper noun like "Kantauganwe it is.")

For people without accessibility needs, speech-to-text is the least help when they most need it...

There are fair use exemptions to copyright for providing access to works for individuals with disabilities, for which subtitles may qualify - but I'm not an expert.

Oh, it's not a "tricky fair use case" at all. They'll end up having to pay to whoever licenses these things fees at some point for using dialogue from scripts (not a transformative use of copyrighted material at all) as the basis of their business. They're flying under the radar now but, you're right, a day of reckoning is coming for them.

I have been using Addic7ed [0] in cases where I need subtitles. Any new shows/series get their subtitles uploaded extremely fast, and as I understand translations also happen there (when already not available from a streaming service).

On the other hand I was using VLSub, a VLC addon, which downloads subtitles automagically. But now I see it used opensubtitles :(

[0] https://www.addic7ed.com/

[1] https://addons.videolan.org/p/1154045/

https://web.archive.org/web/20231116140232/https://blog.open...

Or https://archive.is/UiG9s

Reminds me of the excellent Swedish website undertexter.se which was a community based site for Swedish subtitles. The owner of the site was convicted for copyright infringement. It is a sad world we live in.

I much preferred DivXSweden, which is also dead now. They had some notion of quality control on that site which pretty much every other site I've tried lacks.

Actual title: “Saying Goodbye to OpenSubtitles.org API: Embrace the 20% Black Friday Treat”.

We do love a good embrace

We changed to that now. Submitted title was "OpenSubtitles is not open anymore".

Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

As far as I can tell they are just changing their API? Can someone tell me what makes that less open?

Someone seems to be confusing "free" and "open".

Is there anywhere to get a giant stash of subtitles for data science / academic purposes?

OPUS has a bunch of preprocessed dumps: https://opus.nlpl.eu/OpenSubtitles.php

Perhaps they should consider a rebrand to "ClosedCaptions"?

We should do our own OpenSubtitles with IPFS/Torrents or some other distributed architecture.

Okay. You first.

Possibly misleading. Opensubtitles.org is still up and running.

Until the new year, when it will be closed down, unless you pay

If I read the post correctly, they are making changes to the API, not the website itself, right?

You will still be able to visit the website and download the subtitles you want. You just won't be able to make use of the API without paying for it.

Edit: Nvm they are going to insert ads everywhere

They're already showing ads... maybe you don't see them because you're using an adblocker.

I completely forgot I had that active haha

They’ve been injecting ads during credits for like a decade

It’s still open for us casual users, anonymous free users can download 10 subtitles per day, above that you need a subscription (mainly affects API users).

“Open” != “free”

Before I used to have a subtitles website and mentioned I would downloads subs from his website (keeping any credits in filename or contents)

he wasn't very happy (because my website would compete with him and take ad revenue from him)

at the same time any "extension"/media player that downloads the subs can do it freely

so was it ever open or not?

just because my website had an easier to way to monetize unlike VLC extensions or wtv

Notably, Plex sources its subtitles from OpenSubtitles when the media does not contain them. I wonder what Plex will do in this situation. I don't know the exact mechanism: does Plex download on our behalf, or does the client make the download themselves? Either way, there are downsides for someone now.

I predicted this moment when they switched to opensubtitles.com domain. Realistically though, their importance has diminished noticeably with tools like Whisper.

If you mean OpenAI's Whisper, has anyone created an actual product that people can use with downloaded videos?

Well. I don't know, but in my experience it shouldn't be too hard. The most difficult part would be timestamps I guess.

The Whisper API provides timestamped subtitle files, so that's a non issue, all you have to do is extract the audio, split and upload

I've made this little wrapper to do all that locally. `makesub video.mp4` will split the stream and create video.en.srt locally via whisper.cpp

https://github.com/mcdallas/whispersub

whisper.cpp runs locally and can output .srt, I’ve been using it a lot (takes a while though)

There’s even a version of whisper.cpp that compiles to wasm.

Really quite amazing

Bazaar supports using Whisper as a provider. I don't know how well it works.

https://wiki.bazarr.media/Additional-Configuration/Whisper-P...

I use MacWhisper to transcribe and summarize YouTube videos. Works great.

https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper

Absolutely. Bazaar [0] can download subtitles from tons of sites, and if they're not available, it can use Whisper [1] to generate the subtitles.

[0] https://www.bazarr.media

[1] https://wiki.bazarr.media/Additional-Configuration/Whisper-P...

I've used https://github.com/tomchang25/whisper-auto-transcribe to convert from Dutch to English on my win11 box with some success.

It's not perfect, and it'll completely lose some dialogue, but it's let us enjoy shows that we couldn't before.

Subtitles aren't the same as transcriptions. Transcriptions are literal, subtitles are not. Subtitles have many accessibility rules, like how many words are allowed, how much time should be between successive lines, timestamps should match exactly when the characters starts speaking, etc.

I noticed this when the subtitling plugin for VLC stopped working last month. OpenSubtitles was a nice to resource have, but they've been a bad actor for a long time, adding paid advertisements to other people's freely contributed work. The full heel-turn was probably inevitable.

On the other hand, who is going to tell people about putting a stop to Clearway Law now?

I don't get why they just do not provide a torrent for these? This way big chunk of downloads will be offloaded to other users

Didn't they provide subtitles made by users?

Socialize the cost, privatize the profit.

A lot of pirates already provide subtitles already, and sometimes there are many different languages, and MKV allows to put everything in a single file

It was pretty obvious where this was going when they started putting ads in the subtitles a few years ago.

When I've encountered this, I always assumed it was the subtitle author because it was only on occasion. Less compelling, the sites advertised didn't feel like traditional products/service -- more like linking back to something related to the author.

So long and thanks for all the fish.

OpenSubtitles

OpenAI

Open = Closed

Up = Down

War = Peace

Freedom = Slavery

Ignorance = Strength

I'm going to end up paying them. sad.

Can P2P/torrents replace this?

For distribution. Where does the content come from? Or would they just dump it all out there? One script per torrent?

I never looked into OpenSubtitles, and just assumed it was community translations?

Isn't what chatgpt and whisper diverse solutions are supposed to replace?

whisper doesn't seem to support diarization (identifying when the speaker changes), which is needed for subtitle formatting.

The Enshittification of the internet continues.

Honestly, with things like whisper out in the world it's not as much of a loss. The integration with media players was nice, though.

What whisper?

https://openai.com/research/whisper

If you only care about English.

That's a fair point and in hindsight my comment was shortsighted.

so, with whisper you can generate "live" subtitles from audio? so you can just play a movie in VLC and have your own generated subtitles? that would be cool

only from English?

and what about a translation from English to another language?

You can do it live or you can do it from a video file. There are more than just English models as well, though the performance varies by language. https://github.com/openai/whisper

Holy batman the takes in this thread are pretty terrible. You can still get full data dumps, you can still use the free API but they are limited the number per period. As a heavy user of OpenSubtitles this change looks completely reasonable for such a wonderful service.

The site is down so I can't read the full post, but going off of what's been said in this thread, I generally agree w you. This doesn't stop your casual Plex user from using OpenSubtitles. Viewers all download their subtitles from their own IP, and can authenticate/pay if they want more. It does punish pirate streaming websites from taking thousands of subtitles per day while illegally publishing content.

The Archive link was posted in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38289869

The "full data dump" contains only some metadata and the download link for the file. You can't get all the subtitles from the dump.

Well you can, it just takes the extra step of grabbing the download from the page. I have done it before but I dismissively misspoke and should have said full index of subtitles available.

But can you -- without paying? AFAICS, only if there are fewer items in that full metadata list than the number of pages you can download for free. And the impression I got from this discussion was that this is definitely not the case.

If you don't pay, they'll limit you to 5 downloads per 24 hours. If you pay for a "VIP" account you can download 1000 subtitles per 24 hours.

How long would it take for you download all 6.260.893 subtitles listed in the "dump" with these limits in place?

This is the second commend I read from you where you argue that a full data dump is still available for free, so the change wouldn't change anything about the service being 'open' – but it seems to just be incorrect: the only data dump that I can see is meta-data, arguably of not much use for most of the users.

Yes metadata + url to the page which I have easily parsed out the download link before. Your right, the way I said it was not the best.

No, you cannot get full data dumps

Nice, so now we have OpenAI and OpenSubtitles that has 'Open' in their name and not open :)

A classic tactic used by conmen. Make the victim trust you, then snatch their belongings. Easier than open confrontation.

Well, imdb.com did that without open in the name. Its entire initial database was crowd sourced, end users entering in data about movies, series, tv shows, basically it was wikipedia like.

Then one day it said "oh, so sorry, now this is commercial"

Also wasnt CDDB also the one where basically we ended up with creative commons license?

The basic problem though is servers cost money and time to run. No one really wants to pay much for it. So these sorts of metadata sites come and go because they end up as the destination for popular 3rd party items to basically harvest their data. Then basically whoever runs it runs into an issue (job loss, crazy bill, anger, whatever) and says screw it this now costs money.

Even open confrontation isn't open anymore

Like Facebook/Instagram and others. Attract community and when they achieve network effect they can change rules the rules.

Or, people realising that their envisaged way of working is no longer or was never practical or self-sustaining. As much as you might love doing something for the sake of it, or for a community, at some point there are bills to pay. OpenSubtitles is something someone has to pay for, at some point.

Especially with such cases, assuming malice is weird. The site wasn't acquired by some shady private capital or whatever entity jacking up prices for profit (like Broadcom with VMware), it's the same people(person?).

The “open” means “open your wallet and pay us!”

And OpenOffice, which then got the LibreOffice spinoff

Done forget all the “open source” LLMs based on Meta’s llama.

We have neither the source code nor training data.

Not even similar, you can still get dumps from OpenSubtitles. But I suspect your comment like many others are from users who don't even really use OpenSubtitles often/ever.

Please, go right ahead and grab one of those dumps to see how useful they really are.

It’s just a list of subtitles with download links.

> But I suspect your comment like many others are from users who don't even really use OpenSubtitles often/ever.

I suspect your comment is a whole load of projection.

If you are going to disagree with my opinion than please disprove what I said instead of dismissing it as projection.

I use OpenSubtitles a lot. You can still freely download subtitles, but their will now be limits on the new REST Api they build. You could in theory scrape the site. You can jump on and download things freely. There might be full dumps including the subtitle text itself out there, I would guess nobody cares given the community around it but thats just a guess.

The move is from I understood over the past year to 1) Deprecate the old hard to maintain API 2) Get applications that are using OpenSubtitles to either introduce a OpenSubtitles link in their app or to work with OpenSubtitles to pay for direct access. 3) Help support continued work on both the site and the API.

The new daily usage limits against the API still allow unauthenticated users from using the API, downloads are limited to 5 a day per IP. Authenticated users but non-paying get a bump up from that, and paying (VIP) users get 1k per day. Is it change from the old API? Yes but my impression is the core user base are happy to support. It costs money to maintain the entire system and you can still download subtitles without signing up. The data is still freely available but the transport, API, has new limitations.

Do you use the OpenSubtitles API or website?

What you said had been disproven in this discussion hours before you said it.

Then tell me what was disproven? I am only sharing my insight a user.

"open" as a term has been abused for decades. anyone remember X/Open?

Shame on X/Open for using “Open” but not in the OSI sense... 11 years before the OSI existed.

The OpenSubtitles.org API service is coming to an end, marking the end of an era after 17 years. Non-VIP users will be primarily affected, while VIP members will still have access to the API. The transition is paving the way for a more advanced and streamlined experience with the introduction of the new REST API on OpenSubtitles.com.

To celebrate this change, OpenSubtitles.org is offering a 20% discount on a one-year subscription to VIP membership. VIP members enjoy benefits such as an ad-free experience, direct download links, higher download limits, ad-free subtitles, user profile visibility, and contribute to the platform's development. Users are encouraged to upgrade to VIP membership to take advantage of the limited-time offer and immerse themselves in a premium subtitle experience across OpenSubtitles platforms.

TLDR: Nothing changes except API prices.

> To celebrate this change

Is this a change worth celebrating, then?

(original link gives 503 error to me so I'm happy with the summary here)

It's a celebration for them, I guess.

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