- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
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Finally: ClosedSubtitles
EDIT: Also, MAN, a lot of straight up bootlicking in this thread. What the fuck kind of pirates are you? lmao
ClosedSubtitles, ClosedAI…
So much for “open”
Hey now, I’m sure they’ll still gladly accept free labor for subtitle submissions!
Jesus, reading comprehension is hard to come by eh? How have so many people struggled to actually read this?
They aren’t requiring payment, nor are they requiring you to sign in or create an account.
They are transitioning from an old API to a new one. The new API (and the site itself) is ad supported and rate limited; 5 downloads per day unauthenticated, double that for a free account, or ‘VIP’ accounts have higher limits and no ads.
It’s not authenticated access only, nor is it paid access only.
- java ( @java@beehaw.org ) English35•11 months ago
“It’s not paid, you can pay by watching ads and get a laughable amount of downloads per day for free!”
Sometimes you have to cycle through many subtitles to find the right one. They don’t even produce them.
In the era of VPN, many users share the same IP too. You can reach the limit before downloading anything.
In the era of VPN, many users share the same IP too. You can reach the limit before downloading anything.
Then create a free account and it’s no longer limited by ip and you get double the anonymous limit.
- java ( @java@beehaw.org ) English6•11 months ago
There is no need to have an account for that. This is a purely artificial measure.
How many subs do you download at a time??
Juat spread it out or cough up some cash … >_>- java ( @java@beehaw.org ) English4•11 months ago
I’ve already explained the use-case. Spare me of your “witty” remarks with no value added.
“They don’t even produce them”
Hosting ain’t free, son.
That doesn’t sound very open to me
Title is a bit misleading. Starting with 2024 the site will be moving to a new API. The payment is too be able to continue to use the old API a while longer (for software that can’t be changed yet).
Thank you
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.
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.
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.
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 yearNews has never historically been free, only recently through the web and founded by ads.
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.
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.
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
ha, i love how their reasoning tried to not point out the obvious: money
upgrade to vip for a better user experience! (cuz we made the other one shitty on purpose cuz money)
im not faulting them for charging a price for a service, just dont blow smoke up my ass for why youre doin it.
I’m actually faulting them for trying to make money off a crowdsourced service. They didn’t write the damn subtitles.
Also, wrong fucking audience. The people using this are pirating… what do they think is going to happen when they put a paywall in front 😂
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
They weren’t gaining anything with the free service, now they might get a bit of money from it.
The uploaders often get VIP for free and what will happen is probably just good for them. Leechers aren’t the greatest for torrents nor services.
I pay for it, because it’s cheap and I might as well.
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.
The subs are still free for casual users the ones that need to pay are power users that download through the API.
The API users won’t upload subs or anything, website users are more likely to do that.
I doubt I will switch provider because they seem to be the best by far and I download 1-2 files per movie/series automatically via Bazarr.
If anyone knows any non shit options please tell me.
i didnt know that! fuuuuuck those peoples
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.
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.
My wife is deaf. So subtitles are a deal breaker for any media implementation I implement.
That is why I pay for open subtitles. I get no ads, continued access after this change and I’m helping maintain a service we use daily.
That is why I pay for open subtitles
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
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.
He can put that subscription right up there with his Youtube Premium
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.
you know… most companies include subs in the DVD or file.
For free.
You’re paying for a service that should be the universal standard.True, but some scene members strip the subs from the media, although it’s getting rarer these days.
I also use Bazarr to fetch SDH subtitles which include subtitles for background sounds and the names of who is talking.
I agree that ideally subtitles should be included on all, but we don’t live in a perfect world.
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.
I’m not deaf but I fucking love subtitles.
There’s a lot of mumbly actors out there.
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.
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.
- shiveyarbles ( @shiveyarbles@beehaw.org ) English34•11 months ago
Excellent so now they’ll be paying volunteers for their work!
- Omega_Haxors ( @Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml ) English2•11 months ago
Hey, don’t count on it!
- AMAKI ( @amaki@jlai.lu ) English31•11 months ago
Subscene still exists, fortunately
Subtitles are the easiest material to pirate :) I’m sure they don’t have a copyright either.
Ye, but the problem is the ease of discovery
Yeah probably all integrations are gonna break 😐
I hate them for injecting embedded ads to subs anyways, so hopefully they ruins the platform more so an alternative can emerge.
Technically subs are copyrighted as they’re usually ripped from official sources. They’re selling copyrighted content
@Moonrise2473 even worse: they’re selling copyrighted content that they have no license for
THE BALLS TO EVEN OFFER A “BLACK FRIDAY” DEAL, HOLY FUCK
What? Speak up! I didn’t hear you.
sorry
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 🤔
oh fuck no, this kills qnapi and vlsub, doesn’t it?
I’m afraid yes. I use their API to automatically download subs in jellyfin and I guess I’m gonna lose that too :(
Shit I just started using Jellyfin. How do I do this?
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