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Comment by drivebyacct2 | Hacker News Reader

I had the reverse idea. A plugin for VLC that takes the MD5SUM of whatever file you're watching and looks for the matching/appropriate subtitle file and autoloads it.

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SMPlayer [1] searches opensubtitles.org with a simple hash [2].

[1] http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/

[2] http://trac.opensubtitles.org/projects/opensubtitles/wiki/Ha...

Fantastic. Thanks for this!

Not to pick nits, but I really don't want to compute the MD5SUM of a 4GB DVD before I can play it. Maybe hash the header or the metadata (if there is any) instead?

May be md5 the first hundred and last hundred mb's? Add 10 samples from the middle of the movie taken at equal distances calculated based on the size of the file.

Having said that I don't mind having to compute 4gb md5's, since that also helps me to check the integrity of the file at a later date.

opensubtitles hashes only the initial and final 64kB.

Another project that uses a hash to search for subtitles on opensubtitles.org is Periscope (see http://code.google.com/p/periscope/), a Python command line program that searches several subtitles websites.

I made that project :) It uses hashes for OpenSubtitles and TheSubDB. It uses file names for other sources (Podnapisi, SubtitleSource, ...)

Thanks a lot for it! I really like it and use it almost daily.

I use Totem's "Download subtitles", pick the one with the best rating, click "Play with subtitles", and most of the time it works out perfectly.

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