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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[–] mrbigmouth502@piefed.zip 1 points 1 week ago

I've noticed that if I pass the --config=yes option for mpv in SMPlayer's advanced preferences, it will use some of my mpv config, since it'll load the autoload script I use, but it'll ignore all the settings needed to load YouTube subtitles. Setting disable_player_config=false doesn't change this.

Celluloid, meanwhile, will load subtitles, but using it feels kind of jank compared to mpv by itself. On my setup, you have to pause while it's "loading", then play to actually get a YouTube video to start, and you also have to press J to bring up the subtitles.