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.

  • equivocal@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    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.