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.
Oof. Devs, don’t talk to customers or users like this. Ever. You have no idea what’s actually going on at the other end of the conversation. “Sorry we couldn’t help you,” is all this person needed to say, but now a whole bunch of people are going to stay the hell away from OST paid subs.
This is why you always have a customer service team. You need a layer of people that can actually have a modicum of respect for the user base between them and the devs, or at least the illusion of it.
There’s some FOSS software I’d be happy to support financially if it weren’t for how rude and unhelpful the devs and their chosen spokespersons are. I won’t name them and start fights, but if you’re here on self hosted, you might have an idea who I’m talking about. I know it’s hard work and they’re doing it for free but the poorly-conceiled contempt for users that have anything to say except “Thanks, your the best” is a very ugly look, and it’s unfortunately pretty common. It’s not endearing, makes me less likely to want to help out.
True. I once considered subscribing, some years ago, but customer reviews of OST convinced me not to. Looks like i made the right decision.
You stated that you are a Dev yourself, but then I was expecting that you should have tried to check their API and make the calls with curl, Postman, Insomnia or whatever, but apparently you never tried.
Perhaps the problem was in the third party plugin you were using from the beginning and they cannot really be responsible for that.
I am pretty sure they have monitoring on their API backend and can spot a problem, as I seriously doubt that if the problem was with their API you would be the only one experiencing those problems.
You stated that you are a Dev yourself, but then I was expecting that you should have tried to check their API and make the calls with curl, Postman, Insomnia or whatever, but apparently you never tried.
You’re absolutely right. I didn’t. Because I wasn’t invested in troubleshooting it. I have a full-time job, a family, etc.
The issue here is not about what wasn’t working. The issue here is being told off when simply asking for a refund.
The support person has even acknowledged that my profile was showing no downloads.
I am pretty sure they have monitoring on their API backend and can spot a problem
They are, as evidenced by the screenshot the support person shared showing the number of API calls. And they actually did have a problem with the API, which required an update to the plugin, which is all laid out at the start of my post.
This is partly on you, they asked for logs and you deleted the vast majority of it saying it wasn’t relevant. What if it was? Then when they asked for logs you just shot right to refund.
They’re an ass, but so are you.
Then when they asked for logs you just shot right to refund.
No, I provided logs, twice. Then they ghosted me for almost a month. I’m not complaining, all I did was reply again asking if they could do the refund.
You seem to be missing a hugely important point here. I didn’t want tech support, just a refund. The core tech issue did not matter. They were pushing for logs, and I went along with it. Regardless if the logs I provided were complete or not, I got told off for asking (not demanding) a refund NOT tech support.
Edit: why are you assuming that I deleted the “vast majority” of the log? Where did I mention the total size of the log?
You’re not just entitled to a refund just because you want one, there’s a process to go through it and ignored it….
They wanted to know if the fault lied on their end or your end, one of them they would be liable to refund you, the other is actually on you.
So no, you require tech support BEFORE demanding a refund in almost all cases.
You’re just an entitled prick apparently.
there’s a process to go through it and ignored it….
The process everywhere is:
- request refund
that’s it. Nothing else is required. Anything else is optional.
If they provided you the service advertised a refund is rightly at their discretion.
Sure. But that’s the point of the discussion.
They could have said no, but they didn’t. They responded rudely, gave me a refund, and then deleted my account.
And they are also completely free to deny your refund request as well.
There’s a due process and you choose to ignore it, and are now flaming someone for wanting to figure out if it was a them or you issue.
are now flaming someone for wanting to figure out if it was a them or you issue.
No. I’m sharing my experience with someone who sold a service that didn’t work for me, and in response to asking for a refund told me “I’m tired of talking with you” and deleted my account.
If you’ve got nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all.
Calling a stranger an ass because they’re not living their life exactly how you would, in such a minor unimportant way, is not nice.
Why alter the logs? If they want logs, they probably know how to deal with logs.
For $5, I can’t say I’d bother going back and forth with you about how to send a raw log.
Why alter the logs?
I was trying to be helpful by removing 14k irrelevant lines from a very large, and incredibly verbose, log file.
For $5, I can’t say I’d bother going back and forth with you about how to send a raw log.
This hardly was the issue or point of the post.
That’s not helpful, these are developers… even if you think those lines are useless they can inform the code-path the devs need to trace through or help them understand why you’re facing this issue.
I know how debugging works. I’ve been a developer for a couple decades.
I know for a fact that the lines I removed are normal verbose messages and entirely unrelated to my issue. I know not only because I’m a developer and understand the messages, but also because those lines show up every second of every minute of every day. They are some of the most verbose lines in the logs. The scheduled task for the subtitles only runs once a day and finishes within a few minutes.
Also, they weren’t indicative of any code path because of how frequent they were. At such a high frequency it becomes impossible to determine which line came first in multi-threaded or asynchronous tasks.
The last bit isn’t strictly true - there’s ways to trace such tasks by generating IDs and associating it per task / request / whatever, letting you associate messages together even in a concurrent environment. You can’t just blindly print but there’s libraries and the like to help you do it.
I know, but that’s not the case here.
I don’t know why everyone is giving you shit about modifying log files. That support person was an asshole
What’s the deal with this support person being unaware of how to use basic capitalisation and punctuation in sentences?
We learned that when we were 6.
Deeply, deeply unprofessional. If I had an employee that was this bad at presenting themselves to those outside of the organisation, I’d either insist they learn how to write properly in their own time and apply it at work, or possibly let them go.
It may seem harsh, but they write like a child, and that would reflect very badly on us as a team and organisation in every interaction they had, every day.
you mentioned it twice so I fear the worst, please tell me you didn’t remove 14000 lines manually using a text editor.
What’s wrong with using a text editor to remove lines ? In vim for example :g/pattern/d or :g!/pattern/d with regular expressions is a powerful tool for removing lines in bulk if needed.
Well of course you can do it quickly with vim. Regardless, my suspicion is that OP deleted the lines manually, hence the need to mention it a couple of times. Otherwise, why would they even mention something you can do with grep in a literal second.
I did, because I know they weren’t relevant. They were part of Jellyfin itself and not the plugin. It’s just a warning saying that a database query was slow (12ms). Since I wasn’t doing much on the server for the past few days, half the log was the warning (not an error).
So no, they weren’t part of the problem. I know they aren’t.
Edit: grammar
I get why everyone is jumping on you over this in general, but as someone else with jellyfin, I’ll back you up on this. Jellyfin has too many log entries for slow response it’s insane. Makes the logs barely legible. There is a checkbox to turn off logging those that you might want to consider unchecking.
There is a checkbox to turn off logging those that you might want to consider unchecking.
Oh? I have to take a look when I have a chance. Thanks for mentioning that.
No problem!
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
I’ve glanced at bazarr once before, years ago. But maybe it’s worth taking another look at. Thanks for the suggestion.
It works well
Whisper is perfectly fine as a subtitle generator you can run at home and subtitle a movie in minutes
I literally have a pinned tab for a Whisper implementation on github! It’s on definitely my radar to check out. My only concern is how well does it do things like multiple speakers and does it generate SDH subtitles? It’s the type that has those extra bits like “Suspenseful music” and “[groans]”, “[screams]”, etc. All the stuff someone hard of hearing would benefit from.
Does it do a good job generating subtitles for non english languages? I have a lot of stuff I want to show to my parents but there are no subs in my native language.
Yes the bigger model is quite good
I think I didn’t mention the problem properly. For example, the audio track is in either Japanese or English but the subtitles need to be in Hindi.
If you didn’t get the refund, chargeback.
Yes, they did give me a refund. But I wouldn’t want to do that as doing a chargeback can be incredibly messy for the vendor. I don’t want to be petty here.
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.
Imagine being deaf and having to use subtitles
Or… Just maybe… I like having subtitles. Just maybe.
