Documentation

Quick-start guide

We tried to make this application as user-friendly as possible. On the first start it will try to detect language used on your operating system and switch the user interface to this language (if available). It will also try to detect your proxy settings to enable online communication with the OSDb servers right away.

Once the application is started you can add your video files by either dragging them from Explorer or by clicking the 'Add video' or 'Add folder' buttons.

Once all the video files have been added press the 'Search for subtitles' button (magnifying glass icon in the lower right corner).

The application will connect to the remote OSDb server and ask for subtitle files for your videos. This might take some time but should be fast enough.

You can then browse thru them, select the ones you like most and download them to your local hard-disk drive.

Most of the functionality for downloading is in the popup menus accessible thru right-clicking on subtitle or video files. You can either check all the subtitles you want and then choose 'Download selected' or you can download one-by-one by right-clicking a specific subtitle file and choosing 'Download'.

Subtitle files are (by default) downloaded to the same directory as your video file and are renamed to match your video file. Most players should be able to find them and display them when you play your video file (tested on Media Player Classic). You can choose a different approach to this in the 'Preferences'.

Setting preferences

Preferences/settings are divided into 3 parts:

Proxy

here you can set your proxy server settings to allow communication with OSDb servers. If you're not sure what it means, there's an 'Auto-detect' button to try to figure out these settings for you. Try it!

OSDb

These settings apply to remote OSDb servers you want to use.
The most important is the server's URL. The default is: http://www.opensubtitles.org:80/xml-rpc
You can change it if you want to try a different server supporting the OSDb protocol. If you're registered on the OSDb server, input your username/password here. You can also select your preferred subtitle languages here. Search will be performed only for languages selected/checked here.

Options

several miscellaneous options can be set here.
Template: here you can specify how you'd like your subtitle files named. Available placeholders to use are:

                    %VPATH% - video file path
                    %VNAME% - video file name
                    %LANG%  - language description (e.g. "English")
                    %LANG2% - language ISO639 alpha-2 code (e.g. "en")
                    %LANG3% - language ISO639 alpha-3 code (e.g. "eng")
                    %USER%  - nickname of uploader
                    %ID%    - unique identifier of subtitle file on OSDb server

An example will explain it best:
if you enter here: %VNAME%.%LANG3%_%USER% then an english subtitle for video file 'Shawshank redemption.avi' that resides in folder 'c:\movies\' will be saved to: c:\movies\Shawshank redemption.eng_uploader.srt
To help you out while editing a sample output filename is displayed in the statusbar area, so don't be afraid to experiment a little bit.

Other options should be self-explanatory.

Command-line parameters

OSCAR supports several command-line parameters:

Parameters:

Every directory or video file given on the command-line will be loaded into either Download or Upload content view (depending on the /upload switch position)

Settings:

/ilang:<code>: change interface language to <code>
/server:<number>: switch to remote OSDb server # <number>

Switches:

/upload: switch to Upload content view, all directories/files following this switch on the command-line will be added to Upload content view (as opposed to Download content view)

Supported sites:

If you're interested in the technical background or the standards being used by OSCAR, check Opensubtitles.org trac site. It includes the API specification (called OSDb), examples of calculating the video file hash (in various programming languages), guides, etc.

OSDb API guide can be found at: Opensubtitles.org

The following web sites are compatible with OSDb/OSCAR.

Multi-language support

OSCAR has a multi-language user interface. If you want to contribute and translate to your language, see Opensubtitles.org forum for more information.

History/Changelog

see changelog.txt