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.
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.
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 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. 😅
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
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.
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.
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.
