[ilomambo]

Let's say you catch a movie on a live channel, but it started 15 minutes ago. It would be great to have the option to shift the subtitles ahead by minutes
This would allow to load subtitles while watching streamed live movie channels.

The situation as it is today is that there is no way to use the subtitle addon on live channels (of course you can call the script, but the subtitle will always be way out of sync)

If you think it is a good idea, we can discuss the detailed requirements.

[ilomambo]

As I think about it, the feature would have to include not only subtitle delay by time shift.
It should also include shift by string search into the subtitle file.

For two reasons. One, if you open the live TV channel after the movie started, you don't now exactly how much time elapsed. Second, you probably will get better coarse sync after you hear some dialog, then you could ask the player to shift the subtitle up to that point (if you want to be smarter, the player could automatically time how many seconds it took you to type the search and add it to the resulting match)

[ilomambo]

Well, comments have been made on the bugtracker, but since this is the place to discuss the feature we should do it here.

It has been said that the feature is not practical because live TV has advertisements, and that would take out of sync the subtitles every time.
Live TV not always has advertising, many movie channels just broadcast movies, no advertising. Specially when you pay for it.
But I have not seen any subtitles offered on the stream itself. Moreover, I don't think it would ever offer subtitles in every language, while using the subtitles addon to get them allows to download the language you want from your favorite site.

Another comment, I was sure I already tried to load subtitles on a live TV stream. Last night I tried again.
While the XBMC subtitles addon did download the subtitle I chose, the subtitle was not shown on screen (Subtitle display was enabled)
Either I was playing something else when it worked for me the first time or I don't know what happened, but currently I cannot make them display again.
Maybe it is a bug, or not, I noticed the time slider does keep track of the elapsed time, but it does not show the total time (of course it cannot show it, its live streaming of an unknown TV program with unknown length).
So first we have to solve this issue: display subtitles downloaded on live streams.
Then we can discuss how to shift them to match the dialog.