OpenSubtitles

OpenSubtitles is a community subtitle database. With credentials saved, kino searches and downloads a subtitle per accepted language for each movie it imports — no manual hunting through dodgy subtitle sites.

What it does

When a movie finishes importing, kino:

1. Reads the accepted languages from the movie’s quality profile
2. Looks the movie up on OpenSubtitles by IMDB ID
3. Downloads one subtitle per requested language
4. Saves each next to the media file as <filename>.<lang>.srt

The whole step is best-effort — if OpenSubtitles is down, the search comes back empty, or any individual download fails, the import still succeeds and the failure is logged.

Note

Only movies are processed today. TV episodes are not auto-fetched.

Set up credentials

OpenSubtitles requires a free account plus a separate API key.

1. Sign up at opensubtitles.com.

2. Go to your profile → Consumers and click New Consumer to create one. Copy the API key.

3. In kino, open Settings → Integrations → OpenSubtitles and fill in:

   • API key
   • Username
   • Password

4. Click Test connection. Kino runs a login against the OpenSubtitles API and reports whether the credentials are accepted.

5. Save. The next import that produces a movie file will trigger a subtitle fetch.

If any of the three fields is empty, the integration silently does nothing — kino imports as normal, just without subtitles.

Choosing languages

The languages kino requests come from the quality profile applied to each movie. Edit the profile under Settings → Quality and set its accepted languages list (e.g. en, fr, de). Use the two-letter ISO codes OpenSubtitles expects.

If a profile has no accepted-languages list configured, kino falls back to English (en).

For each requested language, kino picks the first matching subtitle from the search results. There’s no scoring or release-name matching beyond what OpenSubtitles returns.

File layout

Subtitles land alongside the video, named so any player picks them up automatically:

Movies/
  The Matrix (1999) [Bluray-1080p]/
    The Matrix (1999) [Bluray-1080p].mkv
    The Matrix (1999) [Bluray-1080p].en.srt
    The Matrix (1999) [Bluray-1080p].fr.srt

Kino’s player and any external player (VLC, mpv, Infuse, etc.) detect them via the <lang> suffix.

Common issues

Test connection fails — the most common cause is using the wrong password. OpenSubtitles’ web login and API login share the same password; if you have 2FA enabled, you may need an application-specific password (check your OpenSubtitles account settings).

No subtitles fetched after import — check that:

• All three credential fields are filled in and Test connection succeeds
• The movie has an IMDB ID (kino logs a warning and skips if not — rare for anything more obscure than direct-to-streaming)
• The movie’s quality profile has at least one accepted language

Wrong subtitle picked — kino uses the first match per language. For finer control, drop a manually-chosen .srt file into the same folder with the matching <lang> suffix and your player will prefer the local file ordering you set there.

Rate limited — OpenSubtitles caps authenticated requests at 5 per second; kino doesn’t add extra throttling because real-world import flow rarely gets close to that.