If you use FreeTube, you may be aware that it’s really been struggling with SABR reload requests lately. If you’re not familiar, what basically ends up happening is that YouTube will send a request to load an ad or whatever, and sometimes FreeTube will end up in a loop where it keeps reloading over and over.
In any case, FreeTube has an option to view videos in an external player, and this often helps whenever FreeTube itself is acting up. However, one big problem I have with this is that external video players like SMPlayer won’t grab subtitles when you feed them a YouTube URL.
What I’m wondering is if I can set up SMPlayer to automatically grab the subtitle files for the YouTube videos I watch. I imagine MPV can do it, since it’s very scriptable, and I do use MPV as my SMPlayer backend.
I’m using EndeavourOS with the latest KDE Plasma.
The last answer works for MPV. I’ll have to figure out if it’s possible to get it working with SMPlayer as well, but for now telling FreeTube to use MPV directly works.
If anyone doesn’t feel like opening the link, the fix involves adding this to your
~/.config/mpv/mpv.conffile:slang=en,eng,enUS,en-US sub-auto=fuzzy ytdl-raw-options=ignore-config=,sub-lang="en,eng,enUS,en-US",write-sub=,write-auto-sub=