SubDownloader - Easy Subtitle File Downloading for Linux

I found an interesting program today. And the funny thing about it is that it isn't really useful for me, but its usefulness to others, especially speakers of foreign languages, could be immense.

So, what does it do, and when would it be useful?

Well, without getting into the legalities or other issues, let's assume that you've downloaded a movie or television show from the Internet. Or maybe you took a movie you own on DVD and ripped it to your computer's hard drive. But... you forgot about subtitles, and the movie isn't in your language, and there isn't an audio track in your language, so now you can't understand what's going on!

Well, you could go to the website OpenSubtitles.org, which is a clearinghouse for television and movie subtitle files, submitted by people all around the world. Just type in the name of what you're looking for and download a subtitle file appropriate for the video you have and the language you speak.

Or, you could use the program I found.

The name of the program is SubDownloader, and it's available for Linux. It uses a commandline program to do the actual searching of OpenSubtitles.org, but gives the user a nice graphical interface to interact with... plus a few extra features that make it really easy to use.

With SubDownloader, just like the OpenSubtitles.org website, you can search for whatever you're looking for. But if you have a large number of video files (such as a collection of movies or an entire season of a television show), then SubDownloader is much simpler. Just point SubDownloader at the folder where your videos are stored, and it automatically scans through the files. It then compares the hashes of these files to hashes of known subtitle files, and matches the two together.

Simple!

You can then download your subtitle files and start watching. And actually, you can start watching right from within SubDownloader, if you want. Just tell SubDownloader where your prefered video player is, and then click the Play button. SubDownloader will start up your video, and use the subtitle file you just downloaded, all in one easy step.