TL-DR; for stuff that is NOT from sonarrr/radrr (e.g. downloaded long time ago / gotten from friends, RSS feeds, whatever), is there a better way to find subs than downloading everything from manual DDL sites and trying everything until one works (matching english text and correctly synced)?
I am not currently using bazarr and I understand that it can catch anything from sonarr that is missing subs but that is not the use-case I need. I am still open to it but since most of the new stuff I get already has subs, I'm looking more at my stuff that is NOT coming from sonarr bc that's where I have the most missing subs. thinking since there github say:
Be aware that Bazarr doesn't scan disk to detect series and movies: It only takes care of the series and movies that are indexed in Sonarr and Radarr."
that most of my use-case is going to be manual searches. It also sounds like Bazarr uses same kind of DDL sites like opensubtitles and subscene that I am already using as its backend / source so curious if there is any advantage vs looking up old stuff on the sites directly.
And especially if there is some way to match existing files with the correct subs, even if the file/folder names no longer contain the release group (e.g. via duration or other mediainfo data or maybe even via checksums). I know vlc can do it for a single file.. but since I have a LOT of stuff w missing subs, I'm looking for a way that I can do something similar from a bash script or some other bulk job without getting a bunch of unsynced subs.
I got annoyed at not finding CC for the media I have dubbed, so if the show/movie is originally in English and I have it in Spanish, the Spanish subtitles are not from the Spanish audio, but translations of the English audio, so they don't usually match.
(which Tom Scott recently made a video about this issue https://youtu.be/pU9sHwNKc2c)
I found and been using this project https://github.com/jhj0517/Whisper-WebUI
It's been pretty good, for youtube videos (10-30 minutes) has been perfect.
But there are some issues when I tried it with movies, the timings are not great, and sometimes it hallucinates some words in parts where there aren't any. Just a few words are actually wrong/missing.
(I tried it with fastwhisper since I don't have that much ram)
Running it through Subtitle Edit with WhisperX can help a lot for longer movies. It breaks the file into much smaller pieces and runs Whisper on them one by one before stitching the result back together.
interesting, that actually sounds like an awesome idea for the OTA tv rips, cuz I doubt I would even be able to find anything that matches by duration on normal sub sites.
I hadn't heard of whisper gui / whisperx before but I see it has a github. do you know if that is cloud-based or something you can run entirely local? (wondering if it is cloud-based in case i need to allow it net access & also curious if it would eat a lot of bandwidth for roughly 2 seasons of broadcast tv shows aka somewhere around 30-35 hrs worth of audio)
edit: apparently whisper can be run entirely offline according to this so if whisperx is a fork, then i assume it would allow this too
thanks for the suggestion. i was completely unaware of the whisper project and even if it doesnt help much for movies, that might come in real handy for some of the OTA rips I have from my friends (was pretty sure I was SOL for those but this seems like a dcent option).
sounds like it can even be run entirely offline so even better
Jellyfin has a couple subtitling features and plugins. It'll write subs as it streams. If the meta data is still intact, it'll automatically download subs.
was hoping to keep it more light-weight and not bring in a media server but i guess if i'm having this much of a pain doing things the old fashioned way, it's still an idea to try so thanks.
as far as meta data, any clue what it looks for?
asking cuz my collection is a hodgepodge of a bunch of different sources. Most of the stuff that is missing subs are a mix of tv shows and movies that came from either:
makemkv rips and OTA recordings from a few buddies
older tv releases that came from public tracker sites
??? no fucking clue, maybe i ddl'ed it years ago? not sure
I was just poking around with mediainfo on a few movies I am looking for subs for currently and I see some of the ones that were downloaded appear to still have the original file in the Movie name field (including the release group). OTA rips, I kinda feel like I'm probably fucked on bc they aren't even gonna match a standard duration but will check it out
If the video was ripped and prepared as a scene release, it'll download the specific subs for that release using the meta data (assuming they added it when released). If not, I haven't ran into a single issue using Jellyfins Opensubtitle plugin to grab a generic subtitle file for the movie/show if there is no scene info. Its always lined up well.
Don't really need a very powerful server to run Jellyfin. Most NAS hardware, or a Raspberry Pi 3+ handles it just fine. I ran it on a Raspi 3b for several years.
Jellyfins own "on the fly" subtitle writing works fine too...
yeah, i mostly use subscene now. Looks like I was able to pip install subliminal so will check that out.. guess i need to make some accounts/api keys first.
do you still get issues with mismatched / out-of-sync subs here and there?
isn't opensubtitles.COM an impostor of opensubtitles.ORG? which is nasty enough to advertise itself on the original website? or are they actually related?
Just import them into Sonarr/Radarr so Bazarr sees them.
most of my use-case is manual searches
Ideally you should set up Sonarr/Radarr to do what you want with auto searchs (or use the interactive search) but if if you are manually adding them, as long as Sonarr/Radarr are linked to your torrent client correctly they will still see the files and import them automatically.
It seems like you are working against the software instead of working with it. They are designed to make management easier. There's no reason to circumvent Sonarr/Radarr if you're using it. That's just making it harder on yourself.