Submitted 1 year ago by Moonrise2473@feddit.it to mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
https://feddit.it/pictrs/image/c796c36d-cf98-47fd-a68e-4b0da625bc71.webp
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!” - nobody
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Electricity aint exactly free. Even if the data they store is minuscule. Servers will pull >300w if you store 10gb or 2000gb.
a typical (full subtitle) .srt file for a movie is like 100-200 kb - still not much, but 5 is a little off
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.
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.
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?
Because they’re openly dissing their userbase?
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.
HOLY SHIT! 12 whole dollars a YEAR to keep using the deprecated API they don’t want to support anymore. What monsters.
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.
You just need to move to the new API, which is free, the old one is still available temporarily if you pay
It says the new Api is not available to use for all cases
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.
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.
Oh, are chocolate rations up to 60 grams now?
No, they’re up to 20 grams now! Isn’t that great!?
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!
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.
You should tip them too!
Like your landlord
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
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.
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.
Site owner and whomever in marketing wrote that. Pure psychopathy, IMO.
They should rename the site to PaywalledSubtitles.
Except there isn’t a paywall and you can access a limited amount for free
A proper REST API sounds like exciting news to me, and I’m sure anyone who needs to interact with their APIs…
Exciting News For People Who Hate You
Good News for People Who Love Bad News
If nobody gives them money, they’ll revert back… But people will give them money, so they won’t.
You just have to move to the new API which is still free, the old one is temporarily still available by paying
Yeah he said the new one is REST… Does that mean the current one is SOAP or something? Yikes
But the new api is still free, you just have to pay if you want to use the legacy api. This makes sense to get people to switch without requiring them to do it super fast
People were already giving money before this change…
Anger is a form of excitement.
Have you even read the email? It’s still free
For like a month. Then you need to be important and pay them.
Yeah, but the limit seems to be more than appropriate for most people anyway, so I think their pricing model is pretty reasonable
I’d pay 3$ per year for 50/day downloads. That will more than cover the operating cost of my extra load on their servers.
You’re free to do that
Will the new API be free?
Let's be clear in one thing:
That's it. Everything in the Universe, including you, has a "price" on energy. Now outside of all crony-capitalism craziness, we should all consider having a open, distributed, fair price Internet and it's resources.
I'm calling Louis.
Are you by chance using K9Mail?
I mean to be realistic, Whisper (the audio to text AI ) linked with chatGPT can subtitle anything in real time, translated in any language, in very high quality…
Itt: People doom posting without understanding what the change actually entails
Reminds me of another website that rhymes with schmedddit
“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 likely we’re a real business so we can hopefully sell to big corp and make it somebody else’s problem.”
Quexotic@infosec.pub 1 year ago
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”
Tier1BuildABear@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Eyyyyyy got em