Hi everyone! I'm "cxwong".
I've been making & editing subtitles for 10 months on OS.org and am new to both the forum and OS.com. I enjoy taking the time to create 'stylistic', formatted subtitles in *.ass that blend in more with the characteristics of a film than a basic *.srt text file can provide.
I recently discovered OS.com through Plex.tv, which seems to be using the OS.com API to grab subtitles. While I've perused through the two sites' FAQs and a handful of pages here on this forum, I still had a few questions that another user suggested I bring up here.
- As it appears the continued goal is to retire OS.org, what is the current ETA to make OS.com the primary site?
- In a quick skim of OS.com, it doesn't look like *.ass files are offered. Am I correct? Am I wasting time creating formatted, stylistic text in *.ass files? I always wondered why almost everyone else only uploaded *.srt files (at least for English subtitles).
Since this thread asks for feedback, here are some friendly notes during my short time on the OS.com site:
Any replies and feedback is welcome. Thank you in advance!
thanks for the feedback, hopefully ETA later this year, was supposed to be last year but we had a long struggling scaling our infrastructure for the API traffic.
when it comes to ASS, to be honest they have been a huge struggle from the begining, the problem coming from the multitude of formatting, that make them hard to parse. The thing is - all subtitles on opensubtitles.com are parsed and stored as srt, to then be convertible to other formats, and get dynamic adjustments of framerate, time delay, removing ads and so on.
but the current system is limited because the subtitles are imported from almost 20 years of upload history on opensubtitles.org and kept in sync for all references. This is actually a lot more complex than the new upload and management system.
So we could perfectly imagine an improvement for .ass for the new upload system, but it will imply the following:
- We will have to agree on the submitted format to be sure the .ass can be parsed by the system
- Subtitles sent as .ass will then be downloadable as they were sent, with formatting and colors, but it will also be possible to have them as .srt or .sub
- Other subtitles sent as .srt will not be available as .ass
- Older .ass subtitles who currently lost their formatting will need to be re-processed.
We just need a little time, or if some ruby developer reads this and wishes to contribute to a parser for .ass files it could go faster