Sunday 31 July 2011

Download Subtitles For Movies While Watching

Hi everybody, my apologies for not posting frequently but I'm busy with my end semester exams. Today, I am going to talk on how you can download subtitles for the movies you are watching in your VLC player or totem media player.

1) VLC: VLC from videolan is one of the best media players and my personal favourite as well. This open source player is simple yet pretty much powerful. In vlc, you can download subtitles for the movies you are watching by installing the lua script for subtitle download.

A little info about LUA: Lua is a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode for a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.

So all you have to do is grab subtitles finder script and then install the lua file in the proper directory according to your system.

You must put the file in the folder:
- Windows (all users): %ProgramFiles%\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\extensions\
- Windows (current user): %APPDATA%\VLC\lua\extensions\
- Linux (all users): /usr/share/vlc/lua/extensions/
- Linux (current user): ~/.local/share/vlc/lua/extensions/
- Mac OS X (all users): /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/share/lua/extensions/

This script currently gets the subtitles from OpenSubTitles.Org and to use this tool, start the movie in VLC and go to View -> Subtitles and then you can search the subtitle from there easily. Also, there is a upload feature though I've not checked it.


2) Totem: Totem is my another favourite player for being simple and quite fast. This one even does not need any extra plugin/extension to be downloaded. The subtitle downloader plugin is already there within the player but most of us don't know that it is available. To use the plugin, just activate it from the Edit -> Plugins and then just go to View -> Subtitles -> Download Movie Subtitles.

If you are looking for some other alternatives, try splayer.

I hope this works well for you. :)