So my basic setup is that I use Sabnzbd to download my files and I use Plex to play them on various devices. I also share my Plex library with my parents, who have trouble hearing and like to have the closed-captions on the TV. I’ve tried using the opensubtitles option in Plex to have it download subtitles but it doesn’t work very well for TV shows, although great for movies. I recently made the switch over to nzbdrone from Sickbeard and doing some searches for how to get TV show subitles I came across “Subliminal” but it only works with Sickbeard. Is there something similar to use with nzbdrone? I really don’t want to go back to use Sickbeard as I really like nzbdrone but since my parents can’t watch the TV shows without captions my only options are to use Sickbeard or to manually download the subtitles (no way!). So what do people here use? I searched on here and found some posts from 2013 where this was requested but don’t see anything recent on it. Any help or advice is very much appreciated.
Subliminal has nothing to do with Sickbeard and is a standalone program. Why would you not be able to use that?
Not sure you are referring to the same thing.
Subliminal is a tool that can automatically download subtitles for you.
It works together with SickBeard and SABnzbd+
Currently your shows are defined in SickBeard, and SickBeard is configured
with SABnzbd so that it will be downloaded automatically.
From here it ends a little bit, you can use the post-processing from SickBeard so that
the downloaded show will be placed in the right folder and have a pretty name.
But what about subtitles? After Sickbeard has renamed them you have lost the release name.
AutoSub will do it’s best to get subtitles but without the release name there is a chance you
will get the wrong one.
That is where this tool come in, it will be able to do the post processing your shows.
In such a way that they are still moved to the correct place, they are renamed to a pretty
name, but it will safe the original name. Also will it try to download subtitles automatically
for you.
Looks like it uses a SB script that is triggered after the file is imported? Which could work with: https://trello.com/c/mCJyYeZl/122-custom-notifications-similar-to-sab-post-processing-scripts (seems reasonable to send the original name as well as the filename), though we need to clean that up a bit.
There is also this:
Yeah I saw the request on Trello and it looks like it had a lot of votes up, 73 I think? This would be incredibly helpful to have something like this!
What platform are you running on? On OS X / Linux, installing the command line tool, Subliminal, is really easy (like "pip install subliminal" or possibly "sudo easy_install subliminal") (assumes you have pip or easy_install installed).
Then just cd into the show’s directory and do something like "subliminal -l en *"and it should try to get subs for all the files it comes across in the directory.
If you’re on OS X, I’d think you could write a folder action that would fire that command whenever a file was added to the folder, or use a 3rd party program like Hazel to run the command on new files. I’d imagine it would work similarly for Windows-based python installs. With maybe something like Alfred to watch the folder. Not totally sure how to accomplish automagic folder watching on linux… but I’m sure it could be done via scripting/cron/yada.
Should keep you going until (or if) the feature is added to Drone.
Look like the link is to another project. The official repo is here: https://github.com/Diaoul/subliminal
Wow that would be easy! But unfortunately my media server is a Windows machine. I appreciate the info on it though. I do have a MacBook Pro at home though, I wonder if I could run that command on it with a networked drive to my media server?
I’ve been talking about this with one of the Plex devs and he says that the way they identify the subtitles that are searched with the OpenSubtitles agent is kinda cool, using a “digital fingerprint” of the file that way the subs match up to the video downloaded. That’s critical since the file likely isn’t named the same as it was when it was downloaded. It appears that the ones that I’m missing are simply not on OS and that’s why I can’t get them with Plex.
Still, my preference would be to have NZBDrone get them as files are downloaded as soft subs seem to be the better option to use in Plex, vs having to transcode and burn in the subs on the fly.
Subliminal is a python program, so as long as you have python installed, you could run it, call it with a .BAT file, or use Belvedere (I had it confused with Alfred… http://lifehacker.com/341950/belvedere-automates-your-self-cleaning-pc ) to automate the process on Windows.
You can also definitely run the command from your Mac on a networked drive. I updated my subliminal install on my mac last night used pip instead of easy_install because I was seeing errors on my easy_installed version (mac) that I wasn’t seeing on my pip installed version (linux). The command syntax, seemingly, has changed a bit. Now I have to invoke: subliminal -l en -- * to get the same result (with less errors flying by).
Also, I believe the “digital fingerprint” thing is a function of subliminal (which I also believe they are using in the metadata agent in plex) – so this is doing basically the same thing. Only at your command, not automatically(ish, sometimes), from Plex.
I have just switched to NZBGet, from Sabnzbd, there is a Subliminal extension script, that seems to work great with Nzbdrone-downloaded files. Check the NZBGet forum if interested.
Continuing the discussion from Best way to get subtitles for TV shows?:
Has their been any progress on this front in the past half year? I thought better to revive this thread that create another asking the same question. I’m running windows 10 and my wife is a non-native speaker. After having subtitles with sickrage she doesn’t want to lose them if I move to Sonnar. It does not appear that the subtitle feature is currently being worked on.
According to the above post these two features would help but neither are in development:
https://trello.com/c/mCJyYeZl/122-custom-notifications-similar-to-sab-post-processing-scripts (medium priority)
https://trello.com/c/Yh8EmFyG/180-subtitle-downloading (low priority)
As many users are interested in this feature I wonder is anyone has come up with a way to work this out on windows.
I was (am) in the same situation as you and this is how I’ve handled it.
I use nzbGet as my downloader configured with the Subliminal Plugin which is great for post processing movies but frequently comes up short on TV episodes. It’s set to reprocess after 24 hours but to be honest I’m not sure that it ever gets that far.
Locally I use Plex as my media server.which is configured to download subtitles using its onboard subtitles options. Then I have a plex channel set up for podnapasi to augment that.
And finally, the best little bit is that I have PlexTools set up on another channel which allows me to download subtitles on a per episode basis from my mobile which means that I don’t have to come back to my server in order to deal with it and can update from anywhere I am comfortably.
I’ve been using subliminal for a while. outside Sickbeard, Couchpotato, and now also outside Sonarr.
It is as easy as LJSeinfeld explains. After installing the phyton script, in the folder that contains your series, you run the command:
subliminal -l <land code> <land code> <etc> *
This is the most basic way to download subtitles. Subliminal will try to find the best matching subtitles for which you can set the minimal score. It helps a lot if you have Sonarr (or any other download handler) to include the release name and quality. But even without I believe subliminal tries to figure out which subtitle you need. There are a lot of extra options that you can use in your search for subs.
Under linux it is easy to create a cronjob. With Windows you can do something similar. If you do, make sure you use the option: -a AGE, --age AGE download subtitles for videos newer than AGE e.g. 12h,1w2d so that you don’t overload websites like opensubtitles with all the requests from old series that probably will never become available.
Unless Sonarr or its compared ones will build-in a full subtitle search and download handling, it will never work for current series without a stand-alone script. Many subtitles are only posted a long time after the actual video was downloaded. Sonarr or its compared ones, will have to keep on searching for the subs. This is something much more complex than launching a script once the download was completed.