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
I have no skin in this game but I think it sounds like they need to change their name from “open subtitles” to “closed captioning”
Edit: stupid STT
Eyyyyyy got em
Gather all the worlds subtitles under the guise of being “open” and then bait and switch when you’re the largest subtitles database out there.
The free API had a limit of 20 subs/day, you’re not going to tell me those server costs were significant.
The new API has the exact same free limit. They’re just dropping support for the old API soon and people who want to depend on the old version will need to pay for its continued support because they want to push everyone onto the new site/API
then they utterly failed to communicate that lol
It doesn’t say the new API costs money, though. It just says the old API requires VIP for people that can’t switch to the new API…
Yea OP should update the post. OS did a horrible job communicating but its not as dire as the title projects.
I think it goes from 20 to 5. 10 if you’re not anonymous. To get more you need to have contributed to the site, monetarily or other wise.
The minimum for anonymous is 10/day. If you sign up and do nothing else it’s 20.
If you sign up and upload a single file it goes to 50. If you upload 51 subtitles it’s 100. If you upload 101 or more it goes to 200, and if you upload 1001 it goes up to 300.
If you pay $15/year it’s 1000
This is still reasonable IMO, unless people are binge watching a Netflix release in the entire day they can wait for the next day to download subs.
That’s good to know, thanks for the link.
The API documentation needs to be updated.
And yeah sure, server costs and all. OTOH, subtitle files are tiny, so there’s only so much money you can ask for it realistically.
I bet they can put all the subtitles of every movie and show in history on a single 10TB hard drive.
And what does that matter? Millions of requests cost
They ask for $15/year. Cheaper than Nintendo Switch Online
Gather all the worlds subtitles under the guise of being “open” and then bait and switch when you’re the largest subtitles database out there.
MS did something similiar 2007 already.
Why is it called “OpenSubtitles” if you have to pay for it to use it in any capacity?
Probably because anyone can contribute to it. But you have to pay to use them.
Kinda like another website that recently made this change…
Monetizing the goodwill efforts of passionate people is so gross.
Why we need comuity run sites again lemmy is just the start
It’s “Open” in the same way that OpenAI is “Open”.
“Open” ≠ “Open Source” or “Open Access”. It’s more like: “Open for Business”.
Is OpenAI a regular business too?
According to Wikipedia, it’s a non profit with a for profit subsidiary. Interpret that how you will. Nothing shady or deceptive here.
Anything involving software that uses the word “open” in its title should be legally required to be open source.
Because they’re openly dissing their userbase?
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?
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.
Money money money moooonnneey
(Mah-nee!)
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.
Oh, I’m pretty sure it’s close to trivial. $0.0004 per thousand requests is $400 per billion, or $0.40 per million.
That’s as close to insignificant as you can get and still pay attention to. Caching solutions are probably going to end up costing you more in the long run. An HA setup that can handle a billion requests a year is going to cost you at least $100 a month, and still provide less availability than s3.You don’t want unmetered access, but their pricing is unlikely to be based on access rates, and more likely on salary costs and other infrastructure costs, like indexing and search.
Agreed, they could have done this much more gracefully. Same as the reddit API. Average user? Who cares. Sending millions of requests? Okay we’re going to clamp down pretty hard on you
a typical (full subtitle) .srt file for a movie is like 100-200 kb - still not much, but 5 is a little off
If it’s all text, it’d compress quite well, especially since there’s likely lots of repeated words. Not to 5kb of course, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it had at least a 3x compression ratio with zstd.
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.
Just start downloading them and using them to create a new platform. Bam!
(I am saying this with 100% ignorance)
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
Why don’t you go host it yourself then? And open it up to everyone.
You know what?
If you gave me a datadump and a docker image, I’d host it, for free.
Insane I know
If a server costs X and the amount of free users is Y and VIP is Z then you’d need to create an equilibrium where you can make more money to sustain the infrastructure and have enough in case it goes belly up.
Aka: If 10k users are free, and the income from VIP or ads is Z then you have to limit the capabilities of the free users to sustain the platform which in turn can stay (to some anount) free because the VIPs pay for it.
Means: Limit API calls.
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.Oh, are chocolate rations up to 60 grams now?
No, they’re up to 20 grams now! Isn’t that great!?
So what pisses me off in these cases is this: they didn’t contribute with the data. They’re a convenient aggregator, I give them that, but the data came from third parties. If you want to start charging for convenient access to the data you should at least make all data before you started charging available in a bulk download for free.
Don’t call yourself open ffs
openAI anyone?
ClosedAI
You just need to move to the new API, which is free, the old one is still available temporarily if you pay
It says one is not able to use the new API for all scenarios
Yeah but the basic “give me my subtitles for this specific movie” very likely still works just fine, because… that’s like the whole reason they exist
They aren’t charging for convenient access to the data though, they are charging for bulk access. The limitations of the new API should not impact people casually pulling in subtitles with VLC when they watch a movie, which is the purpose the API was intended to fulfill.
They’re just doing what discogs did with music. They’ll create contracts with media companies to allow them to claim that all the info in their DB is copyrighted. Eventhough most of it was user created, it is technically mostly copyrighted data. And then they’ll start the legal campaigns to eliminate any competition. They’ll progressively make it more difficult to access and more difficult to update or get things corrected and it will become frustratingly bad but the only game in town.
So… They’re following the Reddit business model? Let’s see how that works out.
contribute to a greater cause
For the greater good, that is their pockets.
I am your wife! I am the greatest good you are ever gonna get!
HOLY SHIT! 12 whole dollars a YEAR to keep using the deprecated API they don’t want to support anymore. What monsters.
Lol gotta pay for “adfree subtitles”
“Luke, I am [over the moon for these Sobeys™️ rebates!]”
Reminds me of The Truman Show
lol I got that emaik and read that exactly the same.
Someone should hire that author for a large corporation’s pr department
Same here. I didn’t understand why I was euphoric after reading the email until I went back and read the words.
What really caught my attention was OpenSubtitles going from a .org to a .com domain.
So it’s a regular business now?
Always has been. I’ve no clue why they got hold of an org domain. At first they were more like early years wikipedia. Today most subtitles don’t sink with almost any release and their hashes are inconsistent.
You should tip them too!
Like your landlord
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.
I have used Subscene (for movies) and addic7ed (for tv shows) without any issues for years.
Should just have a drive link to a trove of SRT files.
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.
Image Transcription: Email
OpenSubtitles
Dear Redacted,
Exciting news! OpenSubtitles.org is undergoing a transformation, retiring the original API by the end of 2023. Fear not, as this paves the way for the advanced OpenSubtitles.com REST API. We also understand, in some scenarios there is no way to use new API yet, so original API will be avaliable from New Year only for VIP Users.
Change is Good: Introducing the 20% Black Friday Treat!
Celebrate with us! Enjoy a 20% discount on a one-year VIP subscription until November 24th, 2023, so you can use original API. Elevate your VIP experience on both www.opensubtitles.org and www.opensubtitles.com. Instead of 15 USD per year you can get this deal for 12 USD.
VIP Advantage: Unlock Exclusive Benefits
- Usage opensubtitles.org API
- Ad-Free Web Experience
- Direct Download Links
- Higher Download Limits
- Ad-Free Subtitles
- User Profile Visibility
- Contribute to a Greater Cause
Seize this limited-time offer and become a VIP member today. Enhance your subtitle experience - ad-free, seamless, and with higher download limit access.
Good human.
