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.

Email response from OpenSubtitles support confirming there was an issue

They said it wasn’t much help and to get even more logs. Which I provided again.

Screenshot of user CeeBee providing logs via email to OpenSubtitles support

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:

Email response from OpenSubtitles support being aggressive and accusatory

Which resulted in this:

Email response from OpenSubtitles support saying "I'm tired of you" and deleted my account

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.

    • Moonrise2473
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      1 year ago

      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

      • mateomaui@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • mateomaui@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • CeeBee@lemmy.worldOP
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • mateomaui@reddthat.com
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            1 year ago

            Understood, not sure why the jellyfin and kodi plugins would behave differently, but it seems that’s the case. It’s possible the kodi one is still in development and one day I’ll be forced to sign in again.