Exciting news! The free API you were using is no more free!

Moonrise2473@feddit.it to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 965 points –

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

176

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 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

then they utterly failed to communicate that lol

It doesn’t say the new API costs money, though. It just says the old API requires VIP for people that can’t switch to the new API…

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.

The minimum for anonymous is 10/day. If you sign up and do nothing else it's 20.

If you sign up and upload a single file it goes to 50. If you upload 51 subtitles it's 100. If you upload 101 or more it goes to 200, and if you upload 1001 it goes up to 300.

If you pay $15/year it's 1000

This is still reasonable IMO, unless people are binge watching a Netflix release in the entire day they can wait for the next day to download subs.

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.

And what does that matter? Millions of requests cost

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.

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?

According to Wikipedia, it's a non profit with a for profit subsidiary. Interpret that how you will. Nothing shady or deceptive here.

Anything involving software that uses the word "open" in its title should be legally required to be open source.

REST API docs

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.

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.

Agreed, they could have done this much more gracefully. Same as the reddit API. Average user? Who cares. Sending millions of requests? Okay we're going to clamp down pretty hard on you

Yeah this is absolutely not an insignificant fee. Especially if they have millions of requests... There be plenty of caching solutions to save on this though, especially since they wouldn't change often.

Oh, I'm pretty sure it's close to trivial. $0.0004 per thousand requests is $400 per billion, or $0.40 per million.
That's as close to insignificant as you can get and still pay attention to. Caching solutions are probably going to end up costing you more in the long run. An HA setup that can handle a billion requests a year is going to cost you at least $100 a month, and still provide less availability than s3.

You don't want unmetered access, but their pricing is unlikely to be based on access rates, and more likely on salary costs and other infrastructure costs, like indexing and search.

a typical (full subtitle) .srt file for a movie is like 100-200 kb - still not much, but 5 is a little off

If it's all text, it'd compress quite well, especially since there's likely lots of repeated words. Not to 5kb of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if it had at least a 3x compression ratio with zstd.

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.

Just start downloading them and using them to create a new platform. Bam!

(I am saying this with 100% ignorance)

Electricity aint exactly free. Even if the data they store is minuscule. Servers will pull >300w if you store 10gb or 2000gb.

Yeah again so why limit the amount

Why don't you go host it yourself then? And open it up to everyone.

You know what?

If you gave me a datadump and a docker image, I'd host it, for free.

Insane I know

If a server costs X and the amount of free users is Y and VIP is Z then you'd need to create an equilibrium where you can make more money to sustain the infrastructure and have enough in case it goes belly up.
Aka: If 10k users are free, and the income from VIP or ads is Z then you have to limit the capabilities of the free users to sustain the platform which in turn can stay (to some anount) free because the VIPs pay for it.
Means: Limit API calls.

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.

You just need to move to the new API, which is free, the old one is still available temporarily if you pay

It says one is not able to use the new API for all scenarios

Yeah but the basic "give me my subtitles for this specific movie" very likely still works just fine, because.. that's like the whole reason they exist

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.

So... They're following the Reddit business model? Let's see how that works out.

Oh, are chocolate rations up to 60 grams now?

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.

What really caught my attention was OpenSubtitles going from a .org to a .com domain.

So it's a regular business now?

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.

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.

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.

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

  • Usage opensubtitles.org API
  • Ad-Free Web Experience
  • Direct Download Links
  • Higher Download Limits
  • Ad-Free Subtitles
  • User Profile Visibility
  • Contribute to a Greater Cause

Seize this limited-time offer and become a VIP member today. Enhance your subtitle experience - ad-free, seamless, and with higher download limit access.

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..

Will the new API be free?

No idea, not using the website via API

I'm not irritated by the switch but by the phrasing. You can't start an email like this with "exciting news"

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.

Yes, for up to 20 calls per day.

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

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....

Have you even read the email? It's still free

For like a month. Then you need to be important and pay them.

Edit: for the current/legacy API. The new API is free, but limited.

Yeah, but the limit seems to be more than appropriate for most people anyway, so I think their pricing model is pretty reasonable

It's also $12 a year ($15 normally).

It's a small price to pay to ensure everything on your Plex server has subtitles. Subtitling stuff and hosting it isn't free.

Ok but (and correct me if I’m wrong) but aren’t the subtitles crowd sourced? So they are taking user content and then charging for it.

They host and serve the data which cost a lot of money, they are not charging for it they are asking for patronage for those who want to. vip doesn't get you much apart from the feeling of participating (I'm vip). It's not different from lemmy, instance hoster ask for patronage to cover the costs, even though the data is produced by users.

Exactly. I'm all for hating on subscriptions, but this is more than a fair price. Just eat at home instead of buying out for one day a year and it pays for it lol

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.

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...

You just need a GPU running in realtime along side your video playback to analyse what is being played instead of a single text file with timecodes.

Progress!

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.

It's an interesting idea to patch the holes when absolutely no srt files are available.
But why not have an open repository where already present srt files could be shared by people.
We could call it libre-subs or something like that.

Could probably do it with something like a Google coral. You can get one for $60 these days. A lot cheaper than a GPU and less power hungry too.

You can get one for $60 these days.

I think they're $25ish from an official supplier. $60 is scalper pricing. Don't pay a scalper as it just encourages them to do it more.

$25 for the m.2 version at least. It's $60 for the usb version which I assume most people would prefer.

Ah, I didn't realise the USB one cost that much more. I'm not sure most people would prefer the USB version though. It's convenient to move around and you can use it with mini PCs, but cooling isn't as good compared to something that sits in a case with good airflow (so it's more likely to thermally throttle while in use), and having dedicated PCIe lanes as you'd get with an M.2 is way more efficient than using a shared bus like USB. Google have always advertised the USB version for "prototyping" while the M.2 versions are for "production".

For $40, you can get an M.2 version that has two Coral TPUs on a single board. https://coral.ai/products/m2-accelerator-dual-edgetpu. I've got this one with a PCIe adapter, but currently only use one of the TPUs.

That's still another thing that needs to be bought, installed, and fed with power.
My low power would likely melt trying to run Whisper.

A USB coral uses barely any power and if you have a hard time installing USB devices...

Besides, a lot of people are already using them for frigate. I am.

I was only aware of the m.2 variants.

Still, it's a thing to be bought which I have not had to do for years for my media solution.

Seems like a huge waste of electricity

For something like movies or shows you would only just need to run it once and store it in .srt

Yeah but then multiply that by every video file in every Plex library in the world that doesn't have SRTs already.

Yeah, and we could have a website so people that already did the process for a piece of media could share the result with others!

.....oh wait

Does this have a plugin or something for Plex?

Itt: People doom posting without understanding what the change actually entails

Wow, from "We're just requiring registration" to "fuck you pay us" in a day. How brazen.

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 mail@example.com"

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.

This happens like two weeks after I finally install the opensubs vlc plugin.

So it's your fault.

This kind of coincidence happens a lot more than it should to me so I am probably afflicted by a very powerful curse.

“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.”

I would see this comment as silly, if not for the fact they changed the domain from .org to .com

It's all about business now.

Also got this and was like wtf are you trying to hype up here?!

Love how nobody actually read their statement here.

I mean, it is a black Friday treat, so...

Let's be clear in one thing:

  • There's no free lunches.

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.

Plenty of places provide free lunches. They're still paid for, but they're free at the point of service. Eg homeless shelters, Wikipedia.

I can't believe that all this time I could have been getting my lunch for free at wikipedia.org

Jimmy Wales serves it himself, with a side of the softcore porn he first made his fortune on.

That's an unorthodox side dish to say the least, but I suppose beggars can't be choosers.

8 more...

Yarr, this be objectionable, but inconsequential.

Unless you're deaf or hard of hearing.

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).

ADA... extensive coverage? I see you haven't ever tried to get a reasonable accommodation.

Extensive =/= perfect. At least there's a chance of getting reasonable accommodation. With sex discrimination there's almost no hope outside of employment.

Also I'm sure you're speaking with a dollop of hyberbole and overlooking a bunch of accommodation provided up front.

Since Twitter~>X the internet enshitification has accelerated so much…

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.