Downloading Subtitles Using MPC (Media Player Classic)

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MPC means Media Player Classic (download), it is a little old - latest release is dated to 2006-03-20, but that means nothing. It is still one of the best software players floating around. I will show you in this guide how to download perfectly matched subtitles without opening any website using OpenSubtitles.org ISDb protocol.

At the start of deciding which hash should be used for matching subtitles with movies, I checked, if there is no hash algo for this. I found in MPC, it supports downloading subtitles from website, so I contacted Gabest - coder of MPC. We changed some mails, he gave me access to download database, and I came to conclusion - OS should use this special hash - not the best one - but there were already some thousands of hashes submitted. Currently opensubtitles.org have more than 94.000 hashes.

Problem with MPC is, no subtitle database currently exists, so no one can use its unique features. I grabbed some MPC source codes, and programmed ISDb support. Let’s see how it works, it is really simple, and if you will setup MPC, you will (almost) never use “normal” searching anymore.

Step 1: Open MPC, press “O” - you will get options window

Step 2: Find Playback -> Output, change settings to VMR9 (renderless) or VMR7 (renderless) - if you will not change this, Download will be disabled!

Step 3: In options window set in Subtitles -> Database: “www.opensubtitles.org/isdb”, you can test it if you want

Step 4: Open some movie (drag and drop, CTRL+O), and click File-> Subtitle Database -> Download

Step 5: Select some subtitle in your language, click to Download & Open

Congratulations - you are watching movie with subtitles!

If no subtitles are available - don’t panic, go to File -> Subtitle Database -> Search - browser will open and maybe it finds something :) If this step fails too, you have to search those subtitles manually - if they exists on website it means they are not connected with your movie, so it should be nice, if you upload them again.

Maybe you ask how this works - basically it is simple - every movie is connected to subtitle using special hashes (not filenames!). You can help other people, if you will upload subtitles with movie hashes, so other will be able to download them “in fast way”. For the moment it is not possible (and maybe I will never allow this, because I’m afraid there will be many mistakes in uploads) upload subtitles using MPC. For uploading - and for other cool things - you have to use OSCAR or SubDownloader.

Source: http://blog.opensubtitles.org/opensubtitlesorg/downloading-subtitles-using-mpc

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