this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2026
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Can you set up SMPlayer and/or MPV to automatically grab YouTube subtitles? (piefed.zip)
submitted 2 weeks ago by mrbigmouth502@piefed.zip to c/linux@programming.dev
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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.

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[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

EndeavourOS with the latest KDE Plasma.

Same here! It's awesome!

As for the actual question, I personally use FreeTube without an external player and it works fine enough. Maybe check if you have the latest version? It does occasionally reload but it never goes in a loop (at most it reloads two or three times).

[–] mrbigmouth502@piefed.zip 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I'm using FreeTube Nightly, and I'm actually using a newer build than the one that's on the AUR, since you can pull the latest Nightly build from their Github, yay -G the PKGBUILD for freetube-nightly, then modify the PKGBUILD to point at the newer .pacman file. FWIW, this has never really fixed any problems I've had with using whatever the latest version on the AUR is.

But in any case, different people have different results with FreeTube, and it sounds like you've been having better luck than I have. It's not consistent.

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 week ago

Maybe it depends on where you live? Since YouTube seems to change stuff every day