Finding the right subtitles for forced tracks (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 2 months ago by Elarionus@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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What advice do people have for finding subtitles with things that require forced subtitles? Things like Lord of the Rings (where they talk in Elvish) or the Star Wars movies (different alien dialects) often require subtitles. Sometimes movies are entirely unwatchable without them. And for some reason, they aren't baked directly into the video file. This means that opening them in Plex or VLC by default does not display what's being said. This has led to many frustrating situations where I'll be watching something with a group of people and somebody starts speaking in another language. We're all left wondering "Are we supposed to understand what is going on here? Or is it supposed to be a mystery?" And then after 45-60 seconds of them talking in another language, it becomes pretty clear that there are supposed to be subtitles here, and they're just not there.

How are you supposed to know when there should be forced subtitles and when there shouldn't be? How are you supposed to find which one is the correct one where there are often so many options in Plex and VLC that say "English?" Most of them just play subtitles throughout the entire movie, which is irritating for most people we watch movies with.

I've tried messing around with open subtitles, but even that has been heavily hit or miss, and the last few days as I've tried it, the pages won't even load beyond the search.

Any advice?

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[-] entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I use Bazarr to find subtitles. You can set it to only find Forced or to find the regular track for your language of choice and Forced, and it's trivial to set it to include the file itself in the search for subtitles so it'll only download subtitles for videos that are missing the subtitles.

It's also great because it can automatically sync the downloaded subtitles to the actual video's audio, or the existing subtitle track if one exists (like if you just have the full subtitle track and want to sync the Forced track)

[-] Elarionus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 month ago

Unfortunately, the installation instructions for Fedora Linux (my operating system) don't work at the moment. Any other alternatives to this?

[-] entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I use it as a docker container. Should be the same for every Linux distro once you have docker installed

[-] BlackFlagsForever@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I had it running on fedora recently but it requires a) having sonarrr and b) having sonarr setup so that it adds downloads to your torrent client

i had (a) but i only use sonarr as sort of a backup tv-guide tracker (mostly use rss feeds in qbittorrent), largely bc sonarr doesn't really give you a lot of control for using it the way I want to (i like being able to rename/move downloads after they are done and sonarr no like that)

anyway, i never fully confirmed it (server ran, synced with my sonarr shows, but never actually queued any subs) but iirc, i just downloaded the *.tar.gz or whatever and extracted that to ~/Apps/Bazaar (just a custom path - can be anything; I just didn't want to dick around with /opt or needing to do stuff under root account to set it up) then created a desktop file to launch it. Sorry, going off memory since I deleted all my notes / bazaar install files after I realized it wouldn't do what I wanted.

haven't found an alternative yet but I was looking into maybe setting up whisper as a local ai and trying to get it to just generate subs for me. seems liek a lot of people do this but i'm an idiot and need to find an easy guide first