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OpenSubtitles.org is shutting down it's previous API. Now only authenticated access allowed.
(blog.opensubtitles.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 year
News has never historically been free, only recently through the web and founded by ads.
You've never heard of broadcast radio or TV?
Lots of ads
Edit: also tv news is also a new concept.
Right, so ads aren't a recent development.
Ads have existed for an extremely long time.
And most news has cost money since forever.
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.
TV news is 80 years old. It's far from new.
Again, that was not my point.
Not sure why you keep stating it.
Why are you so stuck on the tv thing?
Because you keep insisting on repeating falsehoods.
I mentioned it as a sidenote. It's not important, forget about it.
Either way it's subjective and honestly 80 years is not that long, but who cares 🤷
It is in this context, and you're categorically wrong on all counts.
Again completely ignoring the point...
That everything you've been stating is wrong?
How is something 80 years old "new?"
Relatively new compared to news. Either way it doesn't matter, my point was that it's funded by ads.
Tv news also drives viewers to a channel which is probably the main purpose of it.
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.
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?
People in this community can be a bit extreme when it comes to never paying for stuff and the need to justify it.
I also like piracy but the constant justifications attempts are pretty annoying.
You mean the world renowned, universally known news agency in America owned by billionaires?
I am not familiar with who owns who in the USA. I do know that news wouldn't get made if no one wanted to pay for it.
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.
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.
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
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.