OpenSubtitles forum

Since the migration of OpenSubtitles I am increasingly encountering an error in the formatting of certain downloaded srt files, preventing them to load properly in VLC Player and my subtitle editor (Jubler for OS X). Opening these files in a text editor reveals that the timestamps have a dot instead of a comma between the seconds and milliseconds.

For example:

00:02:33.419 --> 00:02:36.130

instead of

00:02:33,419 --> 00:02:36,130

I'm guessing this occurs in roughly 20% of the srt files that I download.
I've never had this problem before the migration (i.e. when downloading directly from opensubtitles.org), so I'm inclined to think it is related.

Has anyone else encountered this issue?
Is this a bug resulting from the website migration or is it something unrelated, possibly platform-specific, on my side?
Is there a simple workaround? Batch replacing all dots with commas will also affect the actual content of the subtitles.

kind regards and thanks in advance for replies.

I haven't seen anything like this. I mean, I have seen the dot-error occasionally, also in the (far) past, but I think it's just unrelated coincidence.

My VLC player just accepts subs with those dots instead of commas and displays everything normally.

If your player doesn't, a solution would be to load the 'bad' file into Subtitle Edit and just save the file. After that, the bad dots are now good commas.

Thank you for this, we were already notified of this problem in december, and fixed it, but we forgot to cleanup some temporary files.

Everything should be cleared in the next few hours, if this problem ever occurs again, please give me the URL to the faulty subtitle.

In between, you can install our browser extension (infos here: https://www.opensubtitles.com/en/support_us) who will allow you to access the advanced download options, to export the subtitles in .sub format for example.