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I cannot download subtitles. VLC crashes everytime I try. This is the message: the extension Vl sub 0.11.0 doesn't respond and it crashes. My version of VLC is 3.7.0.1
Thanks

Do you mean you get "Extension VLsub does not respond. Do you want to kill it now" / "Extension 'VLsub 0.11.0' does not respond. Do you want to kill it now" ?

If so: http://api.opensubtitles.org/xml-rpc looks down: time-out message after 18 seconds. With some cloudflare info, so that is probably Cloudflare not able to talk to the real server.

I hacked this into my hosts file:

# hack for VLsub while the real api.opensubtitles.org is timing-out
92.240.234.122 api.opensubtitles.org

... now VLsub works again.

EDIT:

The real IP addresses for api.opensubtitles.org are indeed Cloudflare IP addresses:

api.opensubtitles.org has address 104.25.132.104
api.opensubtitles.org has address 104.25.131.104

EDIT 2:

So not a Windows problem, but a server side problem. I wrote a patch for VLsub to at least handles the problem better with a message. See https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/22695

Edit: api.opensubtitles.org is working again.

This worked for me, but then it stopped working a couple years later, until I remarked out the change in by hosts file. I had completely forgotten that I had found this answer then and used the fix, so I never changed it back and eventually the fix quit so I removed it and went back to no active entry in the hosts file, then it started working again.

For reference, the default path of the hosts file in Windows 10 appears to be C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc and you have to open your text editor as admin to edit the file.