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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seize this limited-time offer and become a VIP member today. Enhance your subtitle experience - ad-free, seamless, and with higher download limit access.
Sorry my dude, you are stoking outrage over something you do not use and apparently do not understand. Look at some of the posts that explain it does not mean the whole page is now for profit, it is not.
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
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...
It doesn't need to be realtime since you can pre generate an srt with time codes beforehand using something like bazarr. Whisper also runs faster than realtime in most model sizes, up to 32x realtime so it can really be worth it to add auto subtitles to media in your collection that's missing subtitles as a one time job.
Wait... "Ad-Free Subtitles"? I have never even used or heard of this service, but that just feels like an "insult to injury" or "annoy you into paying" abuse? Am I wrong?
Please tell me that this is not some auto-subtitling service that is going to cause ads to be inserted into the subtitles for other ads or something? Like, how do ads in subtitles even work?
They add one ad at the beginning like "visit example.com" inside the subtitle file
But luckily there aren't many companies that want to be associated with piracy* so in most cases it's blank a generic "advertise here contact [email protected]"
I remember only a campaign that lasted over a year, a service that promotes legal streaming services, filmamo.it
* note: why I said "associated with piracy": those files are going to be used with pirated video files and in most cases are pirated too as they've been extracted from a DVD or a streaming service without a license from the copyright holders. Once I saw a guide "how to use external subs with Netflix" for the rare edge cases where the viewer is watching a content via VPN and his sub language is missing, but those are very rare. Not to mention that for MPAA there's no difference between just torrenting a movie or paying a subscription to Netflix in another country via VPN: for them is all piracy and they want to stop both.
Fucking MPAA. Quite possibly the most corrupt pile of dickheads to ever assemble. They blatantly ignored their own raring guidelines for decades until they decided they got tired of being called out on it and changed them to be so vague that they would he allowed to justify any rating, then started accepting "donations" from production companies to get the ratings they wanted.
“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.”
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.
In which case the ADA provides extensive coverage that demands reasonable accommodations. Hence why reddit backtracked and allowed a few apps free API access (eg RedReader, which is very clunky but still works).
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.