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
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.
Why is it called “OpenSubtitles” if you have to pay for it to use it in any capacity?
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.
Anger is a form of excitement.
