[pronik]

There are different kinds of multilingual. English-German, French-Spanish, Italian-Spanish, basically there is no problem when your languages are co-located. However, try leading a proper multilingual life if you are German-Russian. You couldn't buy a DVD or BluRay with both languages. With streaming, it gets a bit beter, Netflix is actually one of the better players in the market -- more often than not, they do have a Russian translation and subtitles both for their own productions as well as licensed stuff. Disney+ in Germany doesn't seem to have Russian at all, even though they obviously own Russian translations (NB: no streaming service has managed to offer multiple video tracks, i.e. with localized signs in animated films). Maybe this will change when they enter the Russian market (should be this autumn), but again: why does this have to matter to me, living in Germany? The list goes on and on: there is no Russian in Amazon, i.e. Alexa won't understand Russian and also won't understand the titles of any music tracks in Russian (or Japanese for that matter). There is an Alexa equivalent from Yandex called Alice, but you'll be right to guess that I can't just import it to Germany, since it requires geo-blocked russian services to function. It's infuriating, but I guess that's the price we pay for letting US drive the innovation.

Just give me a service where I can pay a €5 per video track, €1 per audio track and €0.50 for a subtitle track with a full catalog of movies and languages from the whole world. Then I can assemble my own Fight Club with English, German and Japanese dubs and Russian, Swedish and Swahili subs without having to resort to piracy.

[yupyup54133]

The going rate for bulk DVDs on Ebay is 36 American cents[1] a piece. My recommendation (and what I do) would be to set up a Plex server[2], buy 2000 DVDs, rip the DVDs to your server, and import any needed subs from online[3]. You can also upscale the DVDs to 720p quality using FFMPEG's implementation of the nnedi3 neural network AI[4] (example script[5]).

[1]: https://www.ebay.com/itm/332587500166?hash=item4d6fc28286:g:... [2]:https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/official-hp-290-p0043w-own... [3]:https://support.plex.tv/articles/200471133-adding-local-subt... [4]:https://github.com/dubhater/vapoursynth-nnedi3 [5]:https://github.com/frypatch/plex-media-optimizer

[kristofferR]

If you are downloading subtitles you are already committing piracy, so you might as well download the whole movie in better quality and with less hassle.

[yupyup54133]

> If you are downloading subtitles you are already committing piracy

OpenSubtitles.org[1] claims that downloading amateur transcribed subs and translation-subs is fair use.

> so you might as well download the whole movie in better quality and with less hassle.

My experience is that most movies that are not extremely popular are either not available for torrent download or if they are the audio is not 5.1 surround sound (6 audio channels whose combined bitrate is 448kbps) and the video bitrate is restricted enough to be DVD quality anyways.

Specifically for the video, a 2GB 1080p h264 compressed video will have an average video bitrate less than 2mbps. Its widely acknowledged that h264 is not greater than twice as efficient as MPEG-2 so lets double that to say that a 2GB 1080p h264 compressed video's perceived bitrate quality is no more than 4mbps. Most commercial DVDs will be 480p MPEG-2 compressed video with a bitrate greater than 5mbps.

For perceived video quality (other than diagonal edges and text) bitrate, not resolution, is what matters. Using an neural network AI upscaler such as nnedi3 (or even something less intensive such as the spline algorithm) to pre-upscale 480p video to 720p video will greatly improve the diagonal edges.

Note: If you have 1080p sources that are larger than 2GB and have 5.1 surround sound then you are absolutely correct in saying that the movie will be better quality. I just have not seen those available for download anywhere for the vast majority of movies.

[1]: https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/dmca

[orloffm]

Alisa (on Station Mini) works perfectly in Poland.