this post was submitted on 05 May 2025

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"Alright, I want to rip a video from a specific website, and this program I found says it can do exactly that for me. Sweet! I just love the convenience of modern technology!" (hexbear.net)

submitted 10 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

16 comments fedilink hide all child comments

"...Oh, apparently I need to install ffmpeg and mkvtoolnix for the ripping program to work properly? Which is fine, maybe a little tedious to install two more programs to get a third one to work, but I guess I can do that? Just this once. Just this once. Like it's free, I shouldn't expect too much, right?"

"Alright, so we've got the HD video with subtitles, now I want to extract and machine translate the subtitles. Thankfully I can just use mkvtoolnix to extract the subs, but I still need to get Subtitle Edit to actually edit and machine translate the subtitles. So I guess that'll be program number four that I'll probably only ever use once, but whatever, it's fine."

"...Now I could just use Google Translate for the machine translation, but I kinda want to run the translation locally, because I feel like that would be better for the environment, my privacy, and not supporting evil megacorporations. But to run the translation locally I apparently need to install something called LibreTranslate. At this point I'm growing a little numb to the amount of programs I have to install despite only needing to use them once, so I'm just gonna look up how to install LibreTranslate... OK, so I just type pip install libretranslate into the command prompt? That's easy enough."

"...Alright, apparently for the pip install command to work, I actually need to install Pip first, which I guess makes sense. To get Pip I first need to install Python, so let's just go do that real quick..."

"...And now that we have Pip, I just have to go into the command prompt and type pip install libretranslate again. — Alright, looks like it's working now... It's working... It's working... Awh, darn, an error right at the end? Something about 'generating the metadata'? Something about 'not being able to find vswhere.exe'? What, is... is it saying I need to install freaking Visual Studio before I can install libretranslate? Like I need a third program specifically to install our fifth piece of software that I will literally only ever use once? And Visual Studio has a bit of a hefty file size to boot, but it's fine I guess, we'll just uninstall it once we're done with this task, OK? OK."

"Alright, I've gone and installed Visual Studio — it took a while — and I've restarted my computer, so now it's just a matter of typing pip install libretranslate into the command prompt once again, and... It's going, hopefully it'll work this time... It's going, and... WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN 'COULD NOT PARSE VSWHERE.EXE OUTPUT'?!?!?!?!?!"

"Alright, alright. Let's look this up. No need to freak out, 'cause we've at least solved the bigger issue of not having Visual Studio to begin with, so I'm sure this parsing issue is going to be an easy one to solve. — Huh, an old Stack Overflow thread says I should try installing the C++ workload for Visual Studio? But how many gigabytes is that!!! I am only going to use this thing once, to install one program which I will also only ever use once! But FIIIIIINE! Have it your way!!!"

[cartoonish sound effects of bangs, clatters and cat screeches]

[panting, eyes twitching, hair frazzled] "ALRIGHT, SOMETHING TELLS ME THAT IT WOULD'VE TAKEN LESS ELECTRICITY TO JUST USE GOOGLE TRANSLATE TO BEGIN WITH, AND LESS TIME AND EFFORT TO JUST TRANSLATE THESE SUBTITLES MANUALLY — BUT I HAVE, AT LAST, MANAGED TO ACTUALLY INSTALL LIBRETRANSLATE ONTO MY COMPUTER. SO NOW WE JUST HAVE TO PLUG THESE SUBTITLES INTO LIBRETRANSLATE AND LET IT RUN FOR A FEW MINUTES..."

...

"THESE TRANSLATIONS ARE

F U C K I N G

U N U S A B L E!!!!!!"

[the last of my hairs turn gray and fall out; I collapse to the floor, covered in wrinkles, a husk of my former self]

top 16 comments

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago

me, everytime i install some opensource thing from github

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 hours ago

if i had to install visual studio for something i would just give up. it's like 10 to 20 gigs. for the future avoid anything that has a python dependency especially if it hasn't been updated in a while. most python packages suck and python dependency management absolutely sucks ass.

tangentially related but anything you want to do that takes time (especially these one time things) consult the xkcd chart. it always helps me stop doing pointless stuff and just pivot to doing something else.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

In my professional experience, soon as Pip shows up, you've strayed from the light, and should consider whether you'd be happier going outside and learning how to farm.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

pip without venv considered harmful

[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

find vswhere.exe

Linux stays winning.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 hours ago (3 children)

Five months into 2025 and I still haven't made the switch like I said I would...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Unironically linux would make this way easier. You just type sudo apt install ___ and it just automatically figures out everything that package needs and installs it for you. It can also automatically remove everything you don’t need any more once you’re done

[–] [email protected] 1 points 57 minutes ago

Windows has package managers

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

Do you play games with anticheat (check the website areweanticheat) that would stop you from moving over?

Do you use software (adobe suite) that would stop you from moving over? Come up with any "these must work" applications and check if people have success running them.

If you can get last these two points and were willing to go through all you went through in this post- you can and should switch for your own sanity.

Feel free to ask more probing questions if you have them and I and others would probably be glad to answer.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

It's like a 3 hour process

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 hours ago

Never underestimate my willingness to procrastinate!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 hours ago

Made me laugh and I get what you are feeling. Sometimes I forget what I wanted to do in first place when installing all this additional software. Unfortunately Open Source software is not always convenient. Most of what we are paying for is just convince.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

if you are interested in subtitles and translation I would recommend subgen, it is a docker that can either analyze your media and generate subtitles (and translate) or if you have a powerful enough gpu it can do it in realtime. I don’t have a gamer mode gpu so I’ve never tried that part but even with just cpu processing a 20ish minute show only takes a few minutes to process on a 10th gen intel processor

It’s nice because even if your media comes with no subtitles it will make them. It is powered by the openai whisper model, which is one of the ones they actually release, so you can run it entirely locally. That does mean it takes a decent amount of disk space (like 8gb or so). In my experience it’s very excellent at generating English subtitles. The translations are mixed but improving; they aren’t as good as translations from the full gpt 4o model and can struggle with colloquial language.

It’s fairly easy to deploy though if you know docker. It’s usable on its own technically via python but the easiest way to use it to also install bazarr, link it to subgen, import your media, and then tell bazarr to generate subtitles. It will generate them in whatever language you want based on your subgen config

https://github.com/McCloudS/subgen

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 hours ago

very interesting. thanks for posting this

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 hours ago

I hate that anything requiring Python requires a specific version of Python. Whatever happened to backwards compatibility? Especially in a programming language?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 hours ago

Some notes:

Pip came with Python; I did not have to install Pip separately.
I never actually installed LibreTranslate nor the C++ workload for Visual Studio, so I don't actually know if installing that workload would've fixed the parsing issue. In reality, when I was hit with the "could not parse" error, I just gave up and used Google Translate instead, and Google Translate's translations were full of more mistakes than they were worth. But something tells me if I actually did install LibreTranslate that it would've been just as bad as Google Translate, if not worse. Machine translation is a difficult thing to do.
The first program is NRK Nedlaster — which is only available in Norwegian, and only works if you have access to tv.nrk.no, which is region locked and blocks VPNs.