Working in SubDownloader
We could say I’m currently in holidays because I’m not officially working in any company, but I spend much part of my free time these days working in my delayed opensource projects. The first one I had to dedicate more time is SubDownloader, which is a Subtitle Automatic Downloader.
The project started few years ago because I need a way to not waste my time searching trought subtitles sites in order to find subtitles for my movies/series. I contacted Brano, the admin of a opensubtitles.org and together we created the API to connect my software with his site.
Why it saves so much time? Well, let’s say you have a folder full with 30 movies, that need subtitles, but you don’t want to go and search 1 by 1 all the titles of the movies in order to find subtitles.
Well, in SubDownloader, you just have to click on the folder that contains that movies and it will show up automatically the subtitles found in few seconds. Then you select the language that you want and voilà , they are downloaded easily.
But what assures me that the subtitle is good for my videos ? Well, due that the database is full of hashes of the videos, you can be sure that the user that upload that subtitle, was having exactly the same videofile that you have now, so that means that it fits almost perfect.
SubDownloader is , of course, Free Open Source Software, FOSS, it was started using WxPython but then I started to like QT so I moved to PyQT, the forge of the project is on Launchpad, so we use bazar, launchpad bugs and translations which makes our work more easy.
The number of downloads passed 1 million 6month ago, so we calculate will be around 1.5 millions by now, it’s a pitty that Launchpad doesn’t seem to care to support the Downloads Counter in their forge, so we cannot see statistics of our current downloads, but we observer that in peek time, there are around 1000 users using connected to the software server at the same time, which is awesome so far.
Plans for the future:
- Make contact with more subtitles sites to advertise the application.
- Make it torrent compatible so the subtitles can be shared by users instead of the current server-client link.
I also have to say that this software won the 1st University Open Source Contest of Spain in the category of Multimedia in 2007. 
Also I need to say that free software can never be illegal and this one isn’t. We don’t own any server hosting subtitles, SubDownloader is just the client to the API of opensubtitles.org .
Our program is mainly based to be used with legal copies of movies, copyleft movies, public domain movies, so if any MPAA-like or SGAE(Spain) try to sue us, that only will give us a lot of publicity in the medias, so go ahead!!! 
With the donations so far, we are going to hire some developers to work in Babiloo, our second open source project that I will talk soon here.
