[Gazzi79]

Wonder if Subscene is fixed yet? my fave Subtitles addon. 😔

[AnonTester]

It's not broken?!? Works fine for me and if it doesn't work for you, you need to post a full debug log.

[juuser]

Subscene plugin has stopped working for me too. It's getting 403 http response code when trying to download due to Cloudflare. It probably checks if there is an actual browser. Easy to reproduce with curl from command line too. Not sure if there is a way around it.

[AnonTester]

@juuser everything is still working fine for me, so it's not a general issue and I can't even do any tests. As long as subscene uses cloudflare and cloudflare is seemingly randomly having an issue with some countries, ISPs, networks or individual IPs, this will continue to cause problems for some users. You can only hope that it resolves itself after a few days and the additional checks from cloudflare aren't required for your connection.

[Dark Steve]

You can only hope that it resolves itself after a few days

A few days?! It hasn't worked for the last year!

I've pretty much given up on the Subscene addon. An addon that "randomly has issues with some countries, ISPs, networks, and individual IPs" is not an addon worth using. You can claim it's not Subscene's fault, but it's Subscene that's chosen to use a service that randomly has issues with some countries, ISPs, networks, and individual IPs. They obviously don't care about their users, their reputation, or providing a reliable service.

[juuser]

@juuser everything is still working fine for me, so it's not a general issue and I can't even do any tests. As long as subscene uses cloudflare and cloudflare is seemingly randomly having an issue with some countries, ISPs, networks or individual IPs, this will continue to cause problems for some users. You can only hope that it resolves itself after a few days and the additional checks from cloudflare aren't required for your connection.

Totally agree that there's not much you or anyone else can do to the addon itself about this problem. There might be a way to circumvent that "bot check", but not sure how without emulating a real user using a real browser. It's a shame that Subscene has decided to use CloudFlare though. We could try to contact Subscene itself somehow in the hopes of them to stop using that service or disabling bot checks. I have to agree with @Dark Steve though - it has not been working for a prolonged period of time by now.

[juuser]

I've created a forum post on Subscene forum - https://forum.subscene.com/topic/cloudfl...-addon-usa

[Forage]

The issue where no results are being produced due to the site's use of CloudFlare can be resolved by using the cloudscrape library.
I did a quick test by adding the add-on version of this library as a dependency and it works nicely.
For those who would like to test as well, install the following two add-ons:
- script.module.cloudscraper.zip
- service.subtitles.subsceneplus.zip

Do note:
- I added the cloudscrape add-on as a hard dependency
- You might need to reboot Kodi
- Due to the way the CloudFlare protection works you'll have a 5 seconds delay for the first request, you need to wait a little bit for the list of results to appear

Things to consider for the final solution, as the cloudscrape Kodi add-on is not included in the default repositories:
- Make the add-on optional and only use it by the subscene add-on when the user manually installed it as well
- Add the cloudscrape add-on to the default repositories
- Include the cloudscrape python library directly into the addon

[AnonTester]

@Forage Nice find. As that cloudscraper module needs to be maintained and is not required by everyone, it makes most sense to add it as a soft-dependency to the subscene addon and use it if available and necessary.

I get 403 errors from your links to the module zip and the adjusted subsceneplus fork. Can you reupload please?

[Forage]

@Forage Nice find. As that cloudscraper module needs to be maintained and is not required by everyone, it makes most sense to add it as a soft-dependency to the subscene addon and use it if available and necessary.

At the same time, I expect more add-ons will suffer from the same (at some point), so making it a generally available add-on will benefit those as well.
But both can be done in parallel. Make it optional for at least the time being and see if there's more interest for this add-on.

I get 403 errors from your links to the module zip and the adjusted subsceneplus fork. Can you reupload please?

The site for the downloads works fine here, I can download them without issues. Please try again as it may have been a temporary glitch.

[juuser]

Looking at the cloudscraper library documentation I see that if no Cloudflare anti-bot challenges exist then all requests are handled normally. This makes me think that maybe it would be better to have it as a hard dependency to subscene addon instead? This would simplify the code, addon installation process (no need to manually get cloudscraper) and things would work even when Cloudflare will be enabled for some geographic location/ISP/whatever when it was not enabled before. Currently subscene just doesn't find any subtitles and it's hard to understand what's the exact reason without looking at technical log files.

[AnonTester]

@Forage it appears zippyshare has been blocking access from UK, Germany, Spain and possibly other European countries since about 2020. Could you please upload to a different filesharing host? Thanks.


@juuser Hard dependency does not mean integrating the cloudflare scraper addon into the subscene addon, but it means that the subscene addon would not install, unless you already have the cloudflare scraper addon installed (hard dependency). Soft dependency means it will install regardless and the addon will check and make use of it, if it is installed.

As not everyone has problems with cloudflare (like myself), a hard dependency is not necessary.
The cloudflare scraper addon has an active maintainer who looks after it and can assist and/or release updates where necessary and other addons may make use of it. I cannot provide any technical assistance for the cloudflare addon and cannot even test anything as cloudflare works fine on my end.
Keeping things separate is the better approach in the same way that you need to install the vfs-libarchive or vfs-rar addon to work with rar files.

[Forage]

@Forage it appears zippyshare has been blocking access from UK, Germany, Spain and possibly other European countries since about 2020. Could you please upload to a different filesharing host? Thanks.

Bummer.

Try this:
- https://www.mediafire.com/file/wvhyz3com...r.zip/file
- https://www.mediafire.com/file/w4hxec2hg...s.zip/file

Or this:
- https://ufile.io/j63p8ci5
- https://ufile.io/mf6secwd

[Dark Steve]

Try this:

Or this:

Thanks Forage. Your efforts are very much appreciated!

[juuser]

@juuser Hard dependency does not mean integrating the cloudflare scraper addon into the subscene addon, but it means that the subscene addon would not install, unless you already have the cloudflare scraper addon installed (hard dependency). Soft dependency means it will install regardless and the addon will check and make use of it, if it is installed.

Got it. I didn't mean about addon, but I meant cloudscraper Python library itself. Not sure how these things are handled in Kodi-land though. My idea was that end-user should not need to worry if he/she needs that cloudscraper library or not to make subscene addon working out of the box. Even if everything is working okay right now for the user, then at one day it might stop working as it did for me and probably many others. The problem is that it's impossible right now to understand the cause of the problem if you're not a software developer. End-user just does not see any errors - subscene addon always shows empty list of subtitles in the Kodi UI and that's it. If you prefer so called soft-dependency for cloudflare scraper addon (and not the Python library itself) then there should be some UI element, which would hint to the end-user that this addon is required for subscene addon to work.