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OpenSubtitles.org is shutting down it's previous API. Now only authenticated access allowed.
(blog.opensubtitles.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
745 points (95.9% liked)
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Jesus, reading comprehension is hard to come by eh? How have so many people struggled to actually read this?
They aren't requiring payment, nor are they requiring you to sign in or create an account.
They are transitioning from an old API to a new one. The new API (and the site itself) is ad supported and rate limited; 5 downloads per day unauthenticated, double that for a free account, or 'VIP' accounts have higher limits and no ads.
It's not authenticated access only, nor is it paid access only.
"It's not paid, you can pay by watching ads and get a laughable amount of downloads per day for free!"
Sometimes you have to cycle through many subtitles to find the right one. They don't even produce them.
In the era of VPN, many users share the same IP too. You can reach the limit before downloading anything.
Then create a free account and it's no longer limited by ip and you get double the anonymous limit.
There is no need to have an account for that. This is a purely artificial measure.
How many subs do you download at a time??
Juat spread it out or cough up some cash ... >_>
I've already explained the use-case. Spare me of your "witty" remarks with no value added.
"They don't even produce them"
Hosting ain't free, son.
It doesn’t say any of that information about non-VIP accounts, go read it yourself, and the information you quoted about anonymous accounts is also wrong.
edit: I won’t be receiving any replies from this commenter. If anyone wants to say I’m wrong, feel free to provide a screenshot from the blogpost proving it.
Since you deleted the comment I replied to:
There's six big ass bold numbered paragraphs detailing the differences between the 'VIP' (paid) users and 'non-VIP' (free) users.
There's also a link to the REST API docs where the first thing it details is exactly how authentication is handled. Specifically: an application looking to interface with opensubtitles will have an api key embedded by its developer and without logging in further will have 5 free downloads/day, that can then be expanded by the end user logging in with their (free or VIP) account.
That documentation lists anonymous accounts (not signed in as a specific user) as rated limited to 5/day. That doubles to 10 for signed in (but still free) users and grows further with VIP.
You realize the developer key is still authentication, hmmm?
Not really, no. Those keys are more or less equivalent to a browser's user agent, difference is you don't choose your own but get them from OpenSubtitles. Motivation probably ranges from "that makes it easy to reject random crawlers" to "we'd like to know the people writing software against our API, or at least have a way to contact them".
You'll also be able to find examples of such keys in repositories in the future in case you don't want to request one of your own but frankly speaking that's a dick move.
To an extent, but it's only really relevant to developers. End users don't see or interact with this at all and aren't required to provide further info.
For 99% of people, this change makes very little, if any, difference. The way it's been worded makes it seem like no one gets to use opensubtitles anymore unless they start shelling out cash.
I was very careful to not say it needs payment
The OP doesn't, but the REST API Docs say:
https://opensubtitles.stoplight.io/docs/opensubtitles-api/e3750fd63a100-getting-started
Though that's not fully 'unauthenticated', as the above is discussing the use of a developer API key. Though that would be built into whatever app is being used.
Except the screencap I provided shows different information, and as you say it’s not in the OP, so there’s still no reason for that guy being a jackass about others being confused about the situation.