which add-on would you recommend for subtitle downloading?

    I've tried a few (OpenSubtitles.org, SubScene, a4kSubtitles). Most of them give me guff about an unmet dependency with "vfs.libarchive". Before I go down the rathole of trying to troubleshoot that gem, though I would ask if there is an easier way to do it!

    Theres so many subtitle add-ons, I figure most of them are crap, some of them are good. I would appreciate any feedback on which ones worked good for you.

    Thank you!

    LE repo > Virtual Filesystems > Archive Support .. it was moved to a binary add-on some Kodi releases ago

    The next issue will be that some of the subs providers have moved to a freemium/subscription model .. and that's not something we can really guide anyone on.

    After much trial and error and some more research, here is how I got it working, in case its useful to somebody else:

    Create a free account at OpenSubtitles.COM (do *NOT* use .org, it must be .com). The .org version looks similar, but the app won't work there unless you pay for premium.

    Install the OpenSubtitles.COM app from Kodi repository (once again, do not install the .org version). Configure the app with username (not email address) and password of the account you created.

    I was still getting the vfs.libarchive error, and because i am not running the latest version of LE I cannot access the LIbreElec repo. So I pulled a sneaky and went to http://addons.libreelec.tv/11.0.0/ARMv7/arm/vfs.libarchive/ with a browser and copied the vfs.libarchive-20.3.0.3.zip to my device over the network, and then did a install add-on-from-zip-file. That was the right file for a OrangePi3LTS, yours will be different.

    I tried a handful of shows and movies, and so far the only one it couldn't get good subs for was a really really old movie. So I am pretty happy with this.

    Opensubtitles.com is one of the sites that now use AI-translated subs, and they are no good, maybe it works for english subs but thats all. I stay away from automaticly downloaded subs and only do it manually so i can check them before use.

    Quote from MatteN

    Opensubtitles.com is one of the sites that now use AI-translated subs,

    oh, i thought you meant they used AI speech to text recognition. Yeah, english text to other languages is surely done by a google-translate equivalent. But all the english subs on opensubtitles.COM have been good so far.


    Before getting this to work I always manually downloaded from the SubScene website, which worked great. but unfortunately their add-on didn't want to work.