
Show HN: SubSync – Automatically download subtitles for your movies - zerratar
https://github.com/zerratar/SubSync
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dale-cooper
How does this compare to subliminal
([https://github.com/Diaoul/subliminal](https://github.com/Diaoul/subliminal))?

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zerratar
I have no idea. I've honestly never heard of subliminal until just recently
(yesterday) and I've never really tried it out.

But on first glance it seem like subliminal is more for developers in general
as it provide apis to use it, it also have a bunch more providers than what
SubSync currently have and most likely a much better way for guessing which
subtitle is correct. It also seem to focus more on individual subtitles rather
than trying to batch download them unlike SubSync. Although they do have
support for downloading for a whole folder. How well that works I have no
idea.

In the end, Subliminal have been in development for over 5 years and has been
thoroughly tested. Whereas SubSync was a weekend project I made 2 weeks ago
and never meant to compete with anything existing. I only knew I had a problem
I needed to solve and wanted to share it with everyone :-)

TL;DR: I don't think SubSync offers anything unique over Subliminal at this
moment. And if you're already used to using Subliminal you should keep doing
so if that works good for you. :-)

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StavrosK
I think the implication was more "why don't you incorporate subliminal support
into SubSync, getting the best of both worlds?".

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Fnoord
Not sure about Plex and Kodi but Emby has a feature to automatically grab
subtitles. It can search for the specific release (likely synchronised) or be
more liberal with the added risk of getting a subtitle which doesn't sync. I
think it uses Opensubtitles, and has no support for a different backend.

VLC uses Opensubtitles as well, but requires manual interaction. It can search
for hash or name.

Both require an account (no API I think).

Subliminal you can run in a Docker environment (Emby as well, I suppose same
with Plex and Kodi) to continuously grab subtitles for new releases.

Ideally, you want multiple providers for this. For example, Subscene and
Addic7ed. AFAIK this isn't possible with any of the software I mentioned.

What I don't understand (actually, I think I do understand: it is because
maintainers of subtitle platforms want to profit via ads) is why there's no
incremental databases with subtitles (like we used to have with serials for
software, forgot the name) so you can just select it offline. The amount of
data is very little because its all text. With some compression and a database
to search, it shouldn't cost a lot of resources. You can have a base, and then
have incremental updates over that, with rebasing every once in a while. Kinda
like HVSC (High Voltage Sid Collection).

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kawsper
I used [https://subtitlesapp.com/](https://subtitlesapp.com/) for a while, but
I think they started charging for it, so I stopped using any subtitles
program.

Thanks for giving me an alternative :)

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zerratar
I'm glad you find this useful!

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some_account
A tip if you want easy subs is to use Kodi. It has plug-ins for subtitle
downloads so you just start playing the movie and go into a list of subs it
found from subscene, opensubtitles or similar. Couldn't be easier.

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ragsagar
Smplayer comes with this feature and it works very well too.

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zerratar
Nice!

I will compile a list later of media players that has this feature and put it
on SubSync github so it can help people out as much as possible.

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tinus_hn
Be aware that this is a legal gray or even dark area, if your product becomes
big you can expect to be hassled or sued by the media companies.

~~~
zerratar
Interesting, which part of it? The fact it consumes from subscene.com without
asking them or because downloading subtitles are illegal?

Reason why I'm asking is because I don't know, and obviously I don't feel like
getting in trouble for a weekend hobby project.

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tinus_hn
In a way there is nothing illegal about offering links to another site. But
subtitles are a derivative work of the original text so they are copyrighted
and also you typically only need subtitles for movies obtained in a
questionable way. So you immediately get involved in legally shady stuff.

The main problem is that if you get sued you stand to lose a lot of money,
even if you eventually win.

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highmastdon
I’m using Media Player Classic with the k-lite codec pack, and there you can
press D to download subs in specific languages

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senatorobama
Does this sync subs to the audio?

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zerratar
Unfortunately, not at the moment. It would be awesome If I could get that
nailed. But that feels like it's a whole project of its own.

I'm exploring the idea though and doing some research on how this can be done.
So it could be a feature for the future. :-)

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heinrichf
Someone started such a project here: [https://machinelearnings.co/automatic-
subtitle-synchronizati...](https://machinelearnings.co/automatic-subtitle-
synchronization-e188a9275617) [https://github.com/AlbertoSabater/subtitle-
synchronization](https://github.com/AlbertoSabater/subtitle-synchronization)

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zerratar
Awesome findings! Thank you.

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rutierut
For mac you can use FlixTools which is pretty decent

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junnan
I use subdl on Linux, a simple command line tool.

