OSDb: Open Subtitles DataBase

OSDb is a protocol first introduced on the ​OpenSubtitles web site. Its main purpose is to eliminate the painful process of searching for subtitles on the web and make finding subtitles to your videos as fast and simple as possible.

Using this protocol you get:

• EXACT MATCHES - instead of having a lot of subtitles matched to a single movie title (or lately IMDb ID), they are assigned directly to a specific video file (using a specific fast hash function). So when searching for subtitles to a specific video file you'll only get those that (according to other users) match your video file 100%.

• SPEED - instead of searching for subtitles on the web site, you can use applications built to support this protocol that offer a user-friendly UI to allow easy and fast search and download of subtitles.

Please keep in mind that this is a new concept (as opposed to other subtitle web sites that are here for quite some time) so the number of available subtitles is lower than can be found on the web. Nevertheless the more people use this system, the more subtitles will be available over time.

So don't give up on us, we believe this is a concept worth looking into and contributing.

OSDb is based on ​Gabest's ISDb design which is an online distributed subtitle database that first introduced this concept along with a 'distributed database' approach.

How works downloading subtitles?

1. you select a video file that you want a subtitle for
2. application calculates a unique hash for this video file
3. application contacts the remote OSDb server and asks it for subtitles matching this specific hash
4. application presents you with a list of matching subtitles (this includes their creation date, rating, ...)
5. you decide which one of them to use and download it
6. you enjoy your movie with subtitles within a few seconds

You can of course select what subtitle languages you are interested in to avoid having too many matches in languages you don't even speak.

How works uploading subtitles?

1. you select video file and subtitle file
2. application calculates md5 for subtitle file, hash for video file and sends all info to OSDb server
3. if there exists already same subtitle file, videohash is inserted to db, so next time it is possible to find these subtitles using application
4. user have to fill some info (imdb, description and so on)
5. subtitles are uploaded, available for downloading using application