Automatically search by hash upon launching the VLSub dialog

[larvanitis]

The title says it all but I think it would be great to skip the first click on "Search by hash".

I believe this is what most people do always first.

[OmerTu]

+1

[jelen-dev]

+1 one but take this idea little bit further. Feature which every movie player should have is autoloading subtitles. BS player has it like 2-3 years, I recently switched to mac so I was forced to switch to VLC. Its so annoying to download subtitles manually. Why would user need to press any button since all he does is: start extension, press "search by hash", choose 1st subtitle and press "download" - cant you just do this automatically on loading the video file? From my point of view it seems very simple and users are going to love you for that.

[exebetche]

I tried to add this feature a long time ago but it caused the interface to crash in most cases on some OS (I can't remember if it was on Windows, Mac or both). Maybe today the GUI implementation is more stable and I should give it an other try.

@jelen-dev On Vlc you can't start extensions automatically with the program so you there's no way to start searching for subtitles if the user hasn't start the extension manually. I think people had already ask the Vlc team to add this feature (automatically start an extension with Vlc) but it has been denied. Beside, opensubtitles explicitly prohibit to use their API without user action: "Disable automatic search feature without user action, call opensubtitles.org API methods per user request only" Source: http://trac.opensubtitles.org/projects/opensubtitles/wiki/DevReadFirst#Implementingopensubtitles.orgsupport

[medv]

It doesn't absolutely need to always start automatically, at least make a second VLSub button that you click and it does the usual routine for you without taking you out of the video or showing you another window.

Watching a whole series is annoying, have to get up to do the thing after every episode.

[JorisDebonnet]

Hi @exebetche, any chance of revisiting this feature request? I noticed VLC 4.0 (nightly build) is still including this extension, so a few usability updates would be awesome :)

There are different possibilities, depending on whether VLC 4 can load extensions immediately or not:

1. (if possible) Load VLSub (in the background) as soon as possible, detect whether a video is already playing, and if it does not already have a subtitles loaded, then open the VLSub dialog.
2. OpenSubtitles prohibits automating the next step, so we still need to manually click a "search button".
3. But this step can be automated again: if a search-by-hash returns a result, then immediately download it and close the dialog. If no match is found, then suggest to the user to do a search via name instead, with the same behavior afterwards.

This would drastically speed up subtitle downloading, especially if VLC can auto-load the extension. What do you think?

[2mg]

I tried to add this feature a long time ago but it caused the interface to crash in most cases on some OS (I can't remember if it was on Windows, Mac or both). Maybe today the GUI implementation is more stable and I should give it an other try.

@jelen-dev On Vlc you can't start extensions automatically with the program so you there's no way to start searching for subtitles if the user hasn't start the extension manually. I think people had already ask the Vlc team to add this feature (automatically start an extension with Vlc) but it has been denied. Beside, opensubtitles explicitly prohibit to use their API without user action: "Disable automatic search feature without user action, call opensubtitles.org API methods per user request only" Source: http://trac.opensubtitles.org/projects/opensubtitles/wiki/DevReadFirst#Implementingopensubtitles.orgsupport

Doesn't BSPlayer automatically search, download and play subtitles from Opensubtitles.org? Is this still an issue with VLC/VLSub?