So this isn’t meant to be a post bashing the devs/owner of OpenSubtitles. This is meant simply as awareness.
A few months ago I signed up for the VIP tier at OST ($5/mo for 1000 downloads a day) for a bit to populate my catalogue of videos with subtitles as my father uses my Jellyfin server and he’s lost a lot of his hearing. I also wanted to support the development a bit. At first the service seemed to be downloading a bit, but then it stopped. I waited a few days and it would download at most one or two a day (despite a few thousand videos not having any subtitles). I look around online and found that OST had changed their API and the Jellyfin plugin still needed to catch-up with a newer release. No big deal, so I just waited.
Then the update released which specifically stated that the changes to the API calls were made. I waited a few days, nothing. I uninstalled the OST plugin and reinstalled, still nothing.
So I figured something was wrong either on my end or the server-side, but I didn’t want to bother getting into it. I’ve been planning to rebuild my Jellyfin server with newer hardware with HW acceleration for decoding and encoding. I sent an email to OST support explaining what I’ve been seeing and asked if I could get a refund.
The person who responded asked for logs so that they could help troubleshoot. So I obliged.
They said it wasn’t much help and to get even more logs. Which I provided again.
I even removed over 14 thousand “[query]” lines to make the logs more readable. They said there wasn’t anything there that was useful, and asked me to try again. I indicated that Jellyfin has a scheduled job that checks for missing subtitles and pulls as needed once a day. But I said that at this point I’m just looking for the refund.
A while passes by but then I get a notification that the subscription is going to be renewed again, so I cancelled before that happened and reached out again about the refund. At this point it was more about the principle of the matter as I originally just asked for a refund and that got side-stepped into a support request.
Then I got this as a response:
Which resulted in this:
I waited over two weeks to write this post. I wanted to wait and see if somebody replied back to me with even just an apology or something. If they had originally told me that doing refunds is hassle for them I would have let it go. But telling me off and then deleting my account is just… special. I was astonished at the response and cannot fathom that being the response from any company taking payments for a service.
And I’m not holding a grudge of any kind and I get it, I used to do IT support and some days can be tough dealing with annoying emails. But in my defence all I asked for was a refund because something wasn’t working. In any case, I just wanted to bring this to the attention of the Self-hosting community so that others can make more informed decisions. To be clear, I’m not advocating anyone to pull support. In face I think they should have more support as it’s an invaluable service. Despite the treatment I still plan on getting the VIP subscription again at some point after I rebuild my Jellyfin server. But I also don’t think that customers should be treated like this.
Why alter the logs? If they want logs, they probably know how to deal with logs.
For $5, I can’t say I’d bother going back and forth with you about how to send a raw log.
Why alter the logs?
I was trying to be helpful by removing 14k irrelevant lines from a very large, and incredibly verbose, log file.
For $5, I can’t say I’d bother going back and forth with you about how to send a raw log.
This hardly was the issue or point of the post.
That’s not helpful, these are developers… even if you think those lines are useless they can inform the code-path the devs need to trace through or help them understand why you’re facing this issue.
I know how debugging works. I’ve been a developer for a couple decades.
I know for a fact that the lines I removed are normal verbose messages and entirely unrelated to my issue. I know not only because I’m a developer and understand the messages, but also because those lines show up every second of every minute of every day. They are some of the most verbose lines in the logs. The scheduled task for the subtitles only runs once a day and finishes within a few minutes.
Also, they weren’t indicative of any code path because of how frequent they were. At such a high frequency it becomes impossible to determine which line came first in multi-threaded or asynchronous tasks.
The last bit isn’t strictly true - there’s ways to trace such tasks by generating IDs and associating it per task / request / whatever, letting you associate messages together even in a concurrent environment. You can’t just blindly print but there’s libraries and the like to help you do it.
I know, but that’s not the case here.
The support person even said they don’t see any queries in the logs, you’d think that would be a clue to send the logs including queries.
No, because those queries were unrelated. They were regular queries checking the existence of the videos. Basically the word query and then the file path.
Whisper is perfectly fine as a subtitle generator you can run at home and subtitle a movie in minutes
Does it do a good job generating subtitles for non english languages? I have a lot of stuff I want to show to my parents but there are no subs in my native language.
Yes the bigger model is quite good
I think I didn’t mention the problem properly. For example, the audio track is in either Japanese or English but the subtitles need to be in Hindi.
I literally have a pinned tab for a Whisper implementation on github! It’s on definitely my radar to check out. My only concern is how well does it do things like multiple speakers and does it generate SDH subtitles? It’s the type that has those extra bits like “Suspenseful music” and “[groans]”, “[screams]”, etc. All the stuff someone hard of hearing would benefit from.
Probably not helping much, but try bazarr if you havent. I have more than one source for subtitles there and feels like its working great. Ignore this if this is opensubtitles issue
I’ve glanced at bazarr once before, years ago. But maybe it’s worth taking another look at. Thanks for the suggestion.
It works well
Imagine you’re so much against dubbed media that you pay a shady site 60 dollars a year to give you pirated and unofficial subtitles of questionable quality and some that are generated by an AI.
You really wrote your own story here huh? Just a complete fan-fiction to indict OP.
Did you even bother reading the first paragraph? There are other reasons for wanting subs besides not knowing the language.
Imagine being deaf and having to use subtitles
Or… Just maybe… I like having subtitles. Just maybe.
This is where I’m at. Even on english stuff I get pretty miffed if there’s no subtitles. It helps me with things I might mishear, or when the sound mixing isn’t great. It’s a comfort too that I’m not mishearing important lines.
I still download subtitles from their .org site, without an account, for everything I watch from my Kodi… I didn’t even know it wasn’t free. Always seemed to be anyway. 😅 I dunno how the plugin I use does it, but it can still to this day just get me subs for anything I watch without any login information, and it’ll then auto-add advertisement in the empty beginning and end minutes, which you can even easily remove…
I know they say this isn’t possible anymore and even that you can only use their new .com website, but I assume there’s still a free loginless API open on .org somewhere. 😅
Have you tried switching to an opensubtitles.com plugin instead? I switched my kodi to that one and now it works great without harassing me for logins.
It’s not the same stuff with a different skin? Files are downloaded from the org website, and on the org website there’s a banner promoting an ai service on the com website
Based on the descriptions they seem the same except for .org/.com, and looks like the .com has an extra dependency “opensubtitlesdev” and maybe is a newer plugin? v1.0.2 vs v5.1.4? AlI know for certain is that the .org insists I login and is generally a pain in the ass, and the .com doesn’t require me to login and hasn’t failed me yet. Which, of course, may change.
edit: oddly enough the .com plugin description also tells you to register/import your account on opensubtitles.com before use, and to my knowledge I’ve done no such thing and still haven’t logged in to the plugin.
Just fyi, as a sysadmin, I never want logs tampered with. I import them filter them and the important parts will be analysed no matter how much filller debugging and info level stuff is there.
Same with network captures. Modified pcaps are worse than garbage.
Just include everything.
Sorry you had a bad experience. The customer service side is kind of unrelated to the technical practice side though.
Yeah, as someone in a tech job whose primary function is “parsing and interpreting logs” sometimes even the repeated flood of seemingly useless logs can be helpful. If nothing else, they explain why there aren’t any useful logs and that can guide how I respond to the problem.
I can’t remember exactly what it was (Emby?) but I distinctly remember one time having my ticket closed because they scoured the log and found mention of a torrented file. They basically had rules that stated if the logs showed evidence of certain things, they’d outright refuse to assist you. Not sure how common that is though.
Sometimes there’s also just file or directory names I’d rather not reveal. So I’ll do a find/replace with some generic titles. But nothing gets deleted outright.
It’s totally fine to bulk replace some sensitive things like specifically sensitive information with “replace all” as long as it doesn’t break parsing which happens with inconsistency. Like if you have a server named "Lewis-Hamiltons-Dns-sequence“ maybe bulk rename that so is still clear “customer-1112221-appdata”.
But try to differentiate ‘am I ashamed’ or ‘this is sensitive and leaking it would cause either a PII exfiltration risk or security risk’ since only one of these is legitimate.
Note, if I can find that information with dns lookup, and dns scraping, that’s not sensitive. If you’re my customer and you’re hiding your name, that I already invoice, that’s probably only making me suspicious if those logs are even yours.
I don’t know why everyone is giving you shit about modifying log files. That support person was an asshole
What’s the deal with this support person being unaware of how to use basic capitalisation and punctuation in sentences?
We learned that when we were 6.
Deeply, deeply unprofessional. If I had an employee that was this bad at presenting themselves to those outside of the organisation, I’d either insist they learn how to write properly in their own time and apply it at work, or possibly let them go.
It may seem harsh, but they write like a child, and that would reflect very badly on us as a team and organisation in every interaction they had, every day.
The space before punctuation thingy is called “Plenken” in Germany and still sometimes used by people who learned on typewriters. Same thing with repeated spaces or dots… to indicate pauses.
But yeah, pretty unprofessional.
