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.
Have you tried switching to an opensubtitles.com plugin instead? I switched my kodi to that one and now it works great without harassing me for logins.
It’s not the same stuff with a different skin? Files are downloaded from the org website, and on the org website there’s a banner promoting an ai service on the com website
Based on the descriptions they seem the same except for .org/.com, and looks like the .com has an extra dependency “opensubtitlesdev” and maybe is a newer plugin? v1.0.2 vs v5.1.4? AlI know for certain is that the .org insists I login and is generally a pain in the ass, and the .com doesn’t require me to login and hasn’t failed me yet. Which, of course, may change.
edit: oddly enough the .com plugin description also tells you to register/import your account on opensubtitles.com before use, and to my knowledge I’ve done no such thing and still haven’t logged in to the plugin.
I’m not sure I follow. I believe there’s only a single (official) plugin for subtitles for Jellyfin.
And if I understand correctly, opensubtitles.org are the same people as opensubtitles.com, so I’m not sure it matters.
I don’t know if you have a jellyfin option, I don’t use that, which I why my reply mentioned kodi.
Another reply of mine in here explains the differences observed in the .org/.com plugins from my end. Again, it may not matter for you.
The plugin I’m using is from the Jellyfin default plugin repo. I can’t remember if the source code repo is under the Jellyfin team directly or if it’s managed by a third party dev. But ultimately there’s only one plugin available.
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.
I get where you’re coming from, but it could have been a single person having a really bad day. It happens to everyone.
I’m just suggesting you consider that also.
This is exactly why such things need to be addressed and talked about though. Sure, this could be a one off. But if even a single other person has experienced similar, it points to a pattern.
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.
If you didn’t get the refund, chargeback.
you mentioned it twice so I fear the worst, please tell me you didn’t remove 14000 lines manually using a text editor.
Text editor or not, when you’re asked for log files provide THE LOG FILES. Don’t edit out lines you think are irrelevant. You don’t know what’s irrelevant or not. If you did, you could fix the problem yourself.
Yeah this is one of my pretty peeves.
When I ask you for the logs I don’t mean cut out the one or two lines you might think are relevant.
Please provide the entire log file unless instructed otherwise.
I have no reason to believe the bits OP removed were relevant. In fact it sounds as though none of it was. But that’s not always the case and support people or the actual developers are just as capable of using the search function in a text editor to locate the relevant parts of a log file as anyone else is.
Please provide the entire log, this “helping” concept causes now issues than it solves, trust.
Sorry, but log files can contain any amount of PII that is absolutely unsuited to be sent over an unencrypted channel to a person/company that should not even need some details.
I sure as hell also skim over logs before I send anything out and remove anything that I don’t want to leak.
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.
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.
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.
Their Download stats look very sus though. Maybe they process their logs three days late, but that drop does not look pretty.
That drop was from when they had modified their API which required applications using the API to update. That’s actually where my story begins.
Edit: actually I checked my email chat again and it was a “nasty bug” that caused the issue. And I think it was that bug fix which resulted in the API changing.
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?
