VLC and automatic subtitles?

Question

I used to watch my movies and series with VLC, but I got tired of always having to download the subtitles.
A long time ago, I read something about a VLC plugin to automatically download subtitles.

Do you have any idea? What do you use to do this task? Do you do it manually?

I'm on Mac OS X.

Solution 1

Sublight automatically downloads subtitles, it works well with movies but I don't how good it works with TV shows, and it's a standalone software not a VLC plugin.

Solution 2

LUA script (Subtitle downloader) to search and download subtitles directly in VLC: here.

Solution 3

Extensions did recently become a part of VLC, but there is currently very little information floating around about them. I do recall seeing a subtitles extension in the nightlies a while ago, but it didn't work at the time. Perhaps that's worth a look.

There are a couple of applications out there for this purpose:

• SubDownloader -- Open source, cross-platform but shareware on Windows (?!). Last I checked it didn't work, presumably due to an API change. When it did work it was pretty good.
• Sublight -- Windows only.
• SolEol -- Cross-platform, broken last I checked.
• FileBot -- Cross-platform

I haven't found a solution that I like yet, so I decided to slowly develop my own. Currently I use a combination of Google, OpenSubtitles and TVsubtitles. I recently tested FileBot and found it to work very well.

Solution 4

I was looking into this isssue the other day and I found out that it can be done by using LUA-scripts. Here is the page on the VideoLan-forum which talks about subtitles.

Hope that this was what you were looking for.

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Comments

[Admin]

see related answer superuser.com/a/571293/162573. In OS X there may be a problem, but I hope not with both extensions. subdownloader is free in osx i guess

[Arkan]

thanks for your answer, but i forgot to specify i was on MacOs...

[haggai_e]

In this discussion it was mentioned that extensions with custom windows aren't supported yet on Mac OS X.

[viam0Zah]

How to install LUA extension in VLC? The documentation is missing...

[Admin]

@JakubNarębski - how to install lua scripts in vlc: Windows (all users): %ProgramFiles%\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\extensions\. Linux (current user): ~/.local/share/vlc/lua/extensions/. Mac OS X (all users): /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/share/lua/extensions/

[Admin]

see my answer for the link to the blog with the updated version

[fixer1234]

Welcome to Super User. If you link to your own external work, you should disclose that. In general, though, the goal of the site is to build a knowledge base of self-contained solutions here, rather than a collection of links to external solutions. Links eventually break, in which case the value of the answer is limited to what's here. You can link to your blog for further reading, but please include the essential information within your answer.