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Can you set up SMPlayer and/or MPV to automatically grab YouTube subtitles? (piefed.zip)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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If you use FreeTube, you may be aware that it's really been struggling with SABR reload requests lately. If you're not familiar, what basically ends up happening is that YouTube will send a request to load an ad or whatever, and sometimes FreeTube will end up in a loop where it keeps reloading over and over.

In any case, FreeTube has an option to view videos in an external player, and this often helps whenever FreeTube itself is acting up. However, one big problem I have with this is that external video players like SMPlayer won't grab subtitles when you feed them a YouTube URL.

What I'm wondering is if I can set up SMPlayer to automatically grab the subtitle files for the YouTube videos I watch. I imagine MPV can do it, since it's very scriptable, and I do use MPV as my SMPlayer backend.

I'm using EndeavourOS with the latest KDE Plasma.

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[–] 4 points 3 months ago (1 child)

Would this work for your case?

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 3 months ago

    The last answer works for MPV. I'll have to figure out if it's possible to get it working with SMPlayer as well, but for now telling FreeTube to use MPV directly works.

    If anyone doesn't feel like opening the link, the fix involves adding this to your ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf file:

    slang=en,eng,enUS,en-US
sub-auto=fuzzy
ytdl-raw-options=ignore-config=,sub-lang="en,eng,enUS,en-US",write-sub=,write-auto-sub=
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    • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    So, quick testing is that mpv will pull subtitles by default but not display them without cycling the track (with J) or setting slang with an available language code[s]. (with slang=en,en-US for English.) Although, it will completely ignore auto-generated subtitles.

    I did find that ytdl-raw-options='sub-langs="en,en-US",write-sub=,write-auto-sub=' will also give the option to use auto-generated subs.

    I'm not too familiar with SMPlayer but I was seeing that you can use an mpv.conf with it.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 3 months ago

    I've noticed that if I pass the --config=yes option for mpv in SMPlayer's advanced preferences, it will use some of my mpv config, since it'll load the autoload script I use, but it'll ignore all the settings needed to load YouTube subtitles. Setting disable_player_config=false doesn't change this.

    Celluloid, meanwhile, will load subtitles, but using it feels kind of jank compared to mpv by itself. On my setup, you have to pause while it's "loading", then play to actually get a YouTube video to start, and you also have to press J to bring up the subtitles.

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    • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

    EndeavourOS with the latest KDE Plasma.

    Same here! It's awesome!

    As for the actual question, I personally use FreeTube without an external player and it works fine enough. Maybe check if you have the latest version? It does occasionally reload but it never goes in a loop (at most it reloads two or three times).

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    I'm using FreeTube Nightly, and I'm actually using a newer build than the one that's on the AUR, since you can pull the latest Nightly build from their Github, yay -G the PKGBUILD for freetube-nightly, then modify the PKGBUILD to point at the newer .pacman file. FWIW, this has never really fixed any problems I've had with using whatever the latest version on the AUR is.

    But in any case, different people have different results with FreeTube, and it sounds like you've been having better luck than I have. It's not consistent.

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