Exciting news for who? Only the site owner is excited that a free resource now requires a subscription
“Yay! Now I have to pay another subscription! I’m so excited! Let’s celebrate with them!” - nobody
https://forum.opensubtitles.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=18389
what about vlc player?
Anger is a form of excitement.
This happens like two weeks after I finally install the opensubs vlc plugin.
So it’s your fault.
This kind of coincidence happens a lot more than it should to me so I am probably afflicted by a very powerful curse.
well it has been deprecated for a few years, and they’re basically asking you to play for continued support.
they have a new REST api, but you still need the old one, pay up because otherwise there’s no motivation to keep it around.A proper REST API sounds like exciting news to me, and I’m sure anyone who needs to interact with their APIs…
Since Twitter~>X the internet enshitification has accelerated so much…
This isn’t enshittification, they deprecated the api a long time ago, now they have a shiny new one that’s free. You need to switch over or pay up. API changing isn’t something unique in programming.
“We’ve just realised that the free offering that got us this far couldn’t possibly make any profit for our shareholders, so we’re making a drastic course correction to make it temporarily seem like we’re a real business so we can hopefully sell to big corp and make it somebody else’s problem.”
Wow, from “We’re just requiring registration” to “fuck you pay us” in a day. How brazen.
Oh, are chocolate rations up to 60 grams now?
No, they’re up to 20 grams now! Isn’t that great!?
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.
I think it’s reasonable move. They have Legacy API that cost them a lot of manhours to maitain and they decided to cut on costs and replace it with a new thing. Sadly they decresed amount of api calls from 20 to 5 [needs citation]
I think they don’t have good PR guy to better communicate the change
Subtitles are like 5kb text files, why even limit their downloads in any way?
Subtitle are like 1h worth of content, why even download more than 10 a day?
They could make it 20 and it wouldn’t change much I guess, 10 does seem a bit low, but if they make it 1000/day (which you could argue is “no heavier than one JPEG”) they’ll have Kodi addons or whatever attempting to auto-download an entire library’s worth of subtitles. It’s not about the throughput, it’s about the processing time of establishing connections, negotiating cyphers, processing a request, hitting a search indexer, etc. All those small costs add up if every day you have thousands of users downloading hundreds of file without giving anything back.
Electricity aint exactly free. Even if the data they store is minuscule. Servers will pull >300w if you store 10gb or 2000gb.
Yeah again so why limit the amount
The overhead isn’t the storage but the request. Processing a request takes CPU time, which can get expensive when people setup a media server and request subtitles for dozens of movies and shows. Every episode of a TV show is a separate request and that can add up fast when you scale it to thousands of users.
If they’re storing them in something like Amazon s3, there is a cost (extremely low, but not free) associated with retrieving data regardless of size.
Even if they were an entirely free service, it’d make sense to put hard rate limits on unauthenticated users and more generous rate limits on authenticated ones.
Leaving out rate limits is a good way to discover that you have users who will use your API real dumb.
Their pricing model seems fucked, but that’s aside from the rate limits.
Yeah this is absolutely not an insignificant fee. Especially if they have millions of requests… There be plenty of caching solutions to save on this though, especially since they wouldn’t change often.
I had issues in the past with opensubtitles serving malware through fake download buttons on the site.
You had like 6 different buttons to download with only one legit.
Sent them an email and they removed them…
I hardly trust this site and really don’t appreciate they use open in their name and pull up shit like this.
I wish we had some sort of P2P sub hosting… So we don’t have to deal with sites like opensubtitles.
Well, the fake download buttons that give you malware is all part of the experience. This very email continues later with this:
Unlike non-VIP users, who might face offers, installers, and redirects before accessing subtitles, VIP members have a streamlined and hassle-free download experience.
HOLY SHIT! 12 whole dollars a YEAR to keep using the deprecated API they don’t want to support anymore. What monsters.
I don’t know skin in this game but I think it sounds like they need to change their name from “open subtitles” to “closed captioning”
Eyyyyyy got em
What really caught my attention was OpenSubtitles going from a .org to a .com domain.
So it’s a regular business now?
Also got this and was like wtf are you trying to hype up here?!
