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Comment by infecto | Hacker News Reader

Holy batman the takes in this thread are pretty terrible. You can still get full data dumps, you can still use the free API but they are limited the number per period. As a heavy user of OpenSubtitles this change looks completely reasonable for such a wonderful service.

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The "full data dump" contains only some metadata and the download link for the file. You can't get all the subtitles from the dump.

Well you can, it just takes the extra step of grabbing the download from the page. I have done it before but I dismissively misspoke and should have said full index of subtitles available.

If you don't pay, they'll limit you to 5 downloads per 24 hours. If you pay for a "VIP" account you can download 1000 subtitles per 24 hours.

How long would it take for you download all 6.260.893 subtitles listed in the "dump" with these limits in place?

But can you -- without paying? AFAICS, only if there are fewer items in that full metadata list than the number of pages you can download for free. And the impression I got from this discussion was that this is definitely not the case.

The site is down so I can't read the full post, but going off of what's been said in this thread, I generally agree w you. This doesn't stop your casual Plex user from using OpenSubtitles. Viewers all download their subtitles from their own IP, and can authenticate/pay if they want more. It does punish pirate streaming websites from taking thousands of subtitles per day while illegally publishing content.

The Archive link was posted in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38289869

This is the second commend I read from you where you argue that a full data dump is still available for free, so the change wouldn't change anything about the service being 'open' – but it seems to just be incorrect: the only data dump that I can see is meta-data, arguably of not much use for most of the users.

Yes metadata + url to the page which I have easily parsed out the download link before. Your right, the way I said it was not the best.

No, you cannot get full data dumps

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