1y ago

OpenSubtitles Hostility

So this isn't meant to be a post bashing the devs/owner of OpenSubtitles. This is meant simply as awareness.

A few months ago I signed up for the VIP tier at OST ($5/mo for 1000 downloads a day) for a bit to populate my catalogue of videos with subtitles as my father uses my Jellyfin server and he's lost a lot of his hearing. I also wanted to support the development a bit. At first the service seemed to be downloading a bit, but then it stopped. I waited a few days and it would download at most one or two a day (despite a few thousand videos not having any subtitles). I look around online and found that OST had changed their API and the Jellyfin plugin still needed to catch-up with a newer release. No big deal, so I just waited.

Then the update released which specifically stated that the changes to the API calls were made. I waited a few days, nothing. I uninstalled the OST plugin and reinstalled, still nothing.

So I figured something was wrong either on my end or the server-side, but I didn't want to bother getting into it. I've been planning to rebuild my Jellyfin server with newer hardware with HW acceleration for decoding and encoding. I sent an email to OST support explaining what I've been seeing and asked if I could get a refund.

The person who responded asked for logs so that they could help troubleshoot. So I obliged.

They said it wasn't much help and to get even more logs. Which I provided again.

I even removed over 14 thousand "[query]" lines to make the logs more readable. They said there wasn't anything there that was useful, and asked me to try again. I indicated that Jellyfin has a scheduled job that checks for missing subtitles and pulls as needed once a day. But I said that at this point I'm just looking for the refund.

A while passes by but then I get a notification that the subscription is going to be renewed again, so I cancelled before that happened and reached out again about the refund. At this point it was more about the principle of the matter as I originally just asked for a refund and that got side-stepped into a support request.

Then I got this as a response:

Which resulted in this:

I waited over two weeks to write this post. I wanted to wait and see if somebody replied back to me with even just an apology or something. If they had originally told me that doing refunds is hassle for them I would have let it go. But telling me off and then deleting my account is just... special. I was astonished at the response and cannot fathom that being the response from any company taking payments for a service.

And I'm not holding a grudge of any kind and I get it, I used to do IT support and some days can be tough dealing with annoying emails. But in my defence all I asked for was a refund because something wasn't working. In any case, I just wanted to bring this to the attention of the Self-hosting community so that others can make more informed decisions. To be clear, I'm not advocating anyone to pull support. In face I think they should have more support as it's an invaluable service. Despite the treatment I still plan on getting the VIP subscription again at some point after I rebuild my Jellyfin server. But I also don't think that customers should be treated like this.

85 comments

Oof. Devs, don't talk to customers or users like this. Ever. You have no idea what's actually going on at the other end of the conversation. "Sorry we couldn't help you," is all this person needed to say, but now a whole bunch of people are going to stay the hell away from OST paid subs.
- This is why you always have a customer service team. You need a layer of people that can actually have a modicum of respect for the user base between them and the devs, or at least the illusion of it.
  There's some FOSS software I'd be happy to support financially if it weren't for how rude and unhelpful the devs and their chosen spokespersons are. I won't name them and start fights, but if you're here on self hosted, you might have an idea who I'm talking about. I know it's hard work and they're doing it for free but the poorly-conceiled contempt for users that have anything to say except "Thanks, your the best" is a very ugly look, and it's unfortunately pretty common. It's not endearing, makes me less likely to want to help out.
- True. I once considered subscribing, some years ago, but customer reviews of OST convinced me not to. Looks like i made the right decision.

Just fyi, as a sysadmin, I never want logs tampered with. I import them filter them and the important parts will be analysed no matter how much filller debugging and info level stuff is there.
Same with network captures. Modified pcaps are worse than garbage.
Just include everything.
Sorry you had a bad experience. The customer service side is kind of unrelated to the technical practice side though.
- Ya, it's a good point. I've actually never had to deal with a client/customer providing logs before. Aside from one system that I built which would collect everything in the backend and provided a tidy zip file to be emailed. I'm used to getting the logs myself and was trying to be helpful without thinking about that.
- Yeah, as someone in a tech job whose primary function is "parsing and interpreting logs" sometimes even the repeated flood of seemingly useless logs can be helpful. If nothing else, they explain why there aren't any useful logs and that can guide how I respond to the problem.
- I can't remember exactly what it was (Emby?) but I distinctly remember one time having my ticket closed because they scoured the log and found mention of a torrented file. They basically had rules that stated if the logs showed evidence of certain things, they'd outright refuse to assist you. Not sure how common that is though.
  Sometimes there's also just file or directory names I'd rather not reveal. So I'll do a find/replace with some generic titles. But nothing gets deleted outright.
  
  It's totally fine to bulk replace some sensitive things like specifically sensitive information with "replace all" as long as it doesn't break parsing which happens with inconsistency. Like if you have a server named "Lewis-Hamiltons-Dns-sequence“ maybe bulk rename that so is still clear "customer-1112221-appdata".
  But try to differentiate 'am I ashamed' or 'this is sensitive and leaking it would cause either a PII exfiltration risk or security risk' since only one of these is legitimate.
  Note, if I can find that information with dns lookup, and dns scraping, that's not sensitive. If you're my customer and you're hiding your name, that I already invoice, that's probably only making me suspicious if those logs are even yours.

Why alter the logs? If they want logs, they probably know how to deal with logs.
For $5, I can't say I'd bother going back and forth with you about how to send a raw log.
- The support person even said they don't see any queries in the logs, you'd think that would be a clue to send the logs including queries.
  
  No, because those queries were unrelated. They were regular queries checking the existence of the videos. Basically the word query and then the file path.
- Why alter the logs?
  I was trying to be helpful by removing 14k irrelevant lines from a very large, and incredibly verbose, log file.
  For $5, I can't say I'd bother going back and forth with you about how to send a raw log.
  This hardly was the issue or point of the post.
  
  That's not helpful, these are developers... even if you think those lines are useless they can inform the code-path the devs need to trace through or help them understand why you're facing this issue.

You stated that you are a Dev yourself, but then I was expecting that you should have tried to check their API and make the calls with curl, Postman, Insomnia or whatever, but apparently you never tried.
Perhaps the problem was in the third party plugin you were using from the beginning and they cannot really be responsible for that.
I am pretty sure they have monitoring on their API backend and can spot a problem, as I seriously doubt that if the problem was with their API you would be the only one experiencing those problems.
- You stated that you are a Dev yourself, but then I was expecting that you should have tried to check their API and make the calls with curl, Postman, Insomnia or whatever, but apparently you never tried.
  You're absolutely right. I didn't. Because I wasn't invested in troubleshooting it. I have a full-time job, a family, etc.
  The issue here is not about what wasn't working. The issue here is being told off when simply asking for a refund.
  The support person has even acknowledged that my profile was showing no downloads.
  I am pretty sure they have monitoring on their API backend and can spot a problem
  They are, as evidenced by the screenshot the support person shared showing the number of API calls. And they actually did have a problem with the API, which required an update to the plugin, which is all laid out at the start of my post.
  
  This is partly on you, they asked for logs and you deleted the vast majority of it saying it wasn’t relevant. What if it was? Then when they asked for logs you just shot right to refund.
  They’re an ass, but so are you.
- Their Download stats look very sus though. Maybe they process their logs three days late, but that drop does not look pretty.
  
  That drop was from when they had modified their API which required applications using the API to update. That's actually where my story begins.
  Edit: actually I checked my email chat again and it was a "nasty bug" that caused the issue. And I think it was that bug fix which resulted in the API changing.

I don't know why everyone is giving you shit about modifying log files. That support person was an asshole

What's the deal with this support person being unaware of how to use basic capitalisation and punctuation in sentences?
We learned that when we were 6.
Deeply, deeply unprofessional. If I had an employee that was this bad at presenting themselves to those outside of the organisation, I'd either insist they learn how to write properly in their own time and apply it at work, or possibly let them go.
It may seem harsh, but they write like a child, and that would reflect very badly on us as a team and organisation in every interaction they had, every day.
- The space before punctuation thingy is called "Plenken" in Germany and still sometimes used by people who learned on typewriters. Same thing with repeated spaces or dots... to indicate pauses.
  But yeah, pretty unprofessional.

you mentioned it twice so I fear the worst, please tell me you didn't remove 14000 lines manually using a text editor.
- Text editor or not, when you're asked for log files provide THE LOG FILES. Don't edit out lines you think are irrelevant. You don't know what's irrelevant or not. If you did, you could fix the problem yourself.
  
  Yeah this is one of my pretty peeves.
  When I ask you for the logs I don't mean cut out the one or two lines you might think are relevant.
  Please provide the entire log file unless instructed otherwise.
  I have no reason to believe the bits OP removed were relevant. In fact it sounds as though none of it was. But that's not always the case and support people or the actual developers are just as capable of using the search function in a text editor to locate the relevant parts of a log file as anyone else is.
  Please provide the entire log, this "helping" concept causes now issues than it solves, trust.
  
  Sorry, but log files can contain any amount of PII that is absolutely unsuited to be sent over an unencrypted channel to a person/company that should not even need some details.
  I sure as hell also skim over logs before I send anything out and remove anything that I don't want to leak.
- What's wrong with using a text editor to remove lines ? In vim for example :g/pattern/d or :g!/pattern/d with regular expressions is a powerful tool for removing lines in bulk if needed.
  
  Well of course you can do it quickly with vim. Regardless, my suspicion is that OP deleted the lines manually, hence the need to mention it a couple of times. Otherwise, why would they even mention something you can do with grep in a literal second.
- I did, because I know they weren't relevant. They were part of Jellyfin itself and not the plugin. It's just a warning saying that a database query was slow (12ms). Since I wasn't doing much on the server for the past few days, half the log was the warning (not an error).
  So no, they weren't part of the problem. I know they aren't.
  Edit: grammar
  
  I get why everyone is jumping on you over this in general, but as someone else with jellyfin, I'll back you up on this. Jellyfin has too many log entries for slow response it's insane. Makes the logs barely legible. There is a checkbox to turn off logging those that you might want to consider unchecking.

Probably not helping much, but try bazarr if you havent. I have more than one source for subtitles there and feels like its working great. Ignore this if this is opensubtitles issue
- I've glanced at bazarr once before, years ago. But maybe it's worth taking another look at. Thanks for the suggestion.

Have you tried switching to an opensubtitles.com plugin instead? I switched my kodi to that one and now it works great without harassing me for logins.
- It's not the same stuff with a different skin? Files are downloaded from the org website, and on the org website there's a banner promoting an ai service on the com website
  
  Based on the descriptions they seem the same except for .org/.com, and looks like the .com has an extra dependency “opensubtitlesdev” and maybe is a newer plugin? v1.0.2 vs v5.1.4? AlI know for certain is that the .org insists I login and is generally a pain in the ass, and the .com doesn’t require me to login and hasn’t failed me yet. Which, of course, may change.
  edit: oddly enough the .com plugin description also tells you to register/import your account on opensubtitles.com before use, and to my knowledge I’ve done no such thing and still haven’t logged in to the plugin.
- I'm not sure I follow. I believe there's only a single (official) plugin for subtitles for Jellyfin.
  And if I understand correctly, opensubtitles.org are the same people as opensubtitles.com, so I'm not sure it matters.
  
  I don’t know if you have a jellyfin option, I don’t use that, which I why my reply mentioned kodi.
  Another reply of mine in here explains the differences observed in the .org/.com plugins from my end. Again, it may not matter for you.

Whisper is perfectly fine as a subtitle generator you can run at home and subtitle a movie in minutes
- I literally have a pinned tab for a Whisper implementation on github! It's on definitely my radar to check out. My only concern is how well does it do things like multiple speakers and does it generate SDH subtitles? It's the type that has those extra bits like "Suspenseful music" and "[groans]", "[screams]", etc. All the stuff someone hard of hearing would benefit from.
- Does it do a good job generating subtitles for non english languages? I have a lot of stuff I want to show to my parents but there are no subs in my native language.
  
  Yes the bigger model is quite good

If you didn't get the refund, chargeback.
- Yes, they did give me a refund. But I wouldn't want to do that as doing a chargeback can be incredibly messy for the vendor. I don't want to be petty here.

I still download subtitles from their .org site, without an account, for everything I watch from my Kodi... I didn't even know it wasn't free. Always seemed to be anyway. 😅 I dunno how the plugin I use does it, but it can still to this day just get me subs for anything I watch without any login information, and it'll then auto-add advertisement in the empty beginning and end minutes, which you can even easily remove...
I know they say this isn't possible anymore and even that you can only use their new .com website, but I assume there's still a free loginless API open on .org somewhere. 😅

Imagine you're so much against dubbed media that you pay a shady site 60 dollars a year to give you pirated and unofficial subtitles of questionable quality and some that are generated by an AI.
- Imagine being deaf and having to use subtitles
- Or... Just maybe... I like having subtitles. Just maybe.
  
  This is where I'm at. Even on english stuff I get pretty miffed if there's no subtitles. It helps me with things I might mishear, or when the sound mixing isn't great. It's a comfort too that I'm not mishearing important lines.
- Did you even bother reading the first paragraph? There are other reasons for wanting subs besides not knowing the language.
- You really wrote your own story here huh? Just a complete fan-fiction to indict OP.

85 comments