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Bazarr — Subtitle Provider & Sync Configuration

Bazarr is the subtitle companion to Radarr and Sonarr in the CineVault stack. It watches the libraries those two apps manage and pulls down matching subtitle tracks for each movie or episode. For a Dutch / English bilingual household the defaults are not good enough — Bazarr will happily download mis-synced WEB-DL subtitles over the top of a perfectly good embedded MKV track, or grab five copies of the same .srt from five different providers.

This page documents the exact UI clicks required to make a fresh Bazarr deployment produce accurate, synchronised and deduplicated subtitles for NL + EN viewers.

!!! warning "Stateful configuration" Everything on this page lives inside Bazarr's own SQLite database (/opt/mediastack/data/bazarr/). It is not managed by Ansible — these steps must be performed once via the web UI after the container is up.

A. Subtitle Providers

Navigate to Settings -> Providers and enable only the following stack. This combination has been tested for English and Dutch coverage across both movies and TV without burning through any single provider's rate limit.

Provider Account required Best for
OpenSubtitles.com Yes (free account) General coverage
Addic7ed Yes (free account) TV shows
Podnapisi No Dutch + EU titles
YIFY No Movies only
BSPlayer No Fallback / fill-in

!!! warning "Do NOT enable every provider" Bazarr will query every enabled provider for every missing subtitle on every search cycle. Enabling the full list in the UI is the single fastest way to get your IP rate-limited or temporarily banned by OpenSubtitles and Addic7ed — both of which enforce strict daily download caps on free accounts. Stick to the five providers above.

!!! note "Subscene is dead" Subscene was shut down permanently in 2024 and its API no longer responds. If you see it listed in the provider dropdown, do not enable it — it will only generate failed-request log spam. Any older guide that recommends Subscene is out of date.

B. Preventing Duplicate Subtitle Downloads

A correctly tagged MKV from a good release group usually already contains the Dutch and English subtitle tracks embedded inside the container. Without the settings below, Bazarr will ignore those embedded tracks and download external .srt files anyway — leaving you with two copies of the same subtitle (one inside the MKV, one next to it on disk) and the external sidecar taking priority in most players.

Navigate to Settings -> Subtitles and enable both of the following options:

  • Use Embedded Subtitles — tells Bazarr to count the MKV's internal subtitle tracks as valid coverage for the language profile.
  • Analyze Video Files — tells Bazarr to actually open each file with ffprobe on import so it knows which embedded tracks exist in the first place. Without this toggle the previous option does nothing, because Bazarr has no idea what is inside the MKV.

With both enabled, Bazarr will skip the external download entirely whenever the MKV already ships with the desired language track, eliminating the duplicate-subtitle problem at the source.

C. Audio-Based Synchronisation

External subtitles are notoriously mis-timed — a WEB-DL sub applied to a BluRay release is typically off by several seconds because of the distributor's intro card, and even "matching" releases drift by 100–500 ms. Bazarr ships with two waveform-based sync tools that fix this automatically.

Navigate to Settings -> Subtitles and configure:

  1. Enable Automatic Subtitles Synchronization.
  2. Select either alass or ffsubsync as the sync engine.

Both tools are already installed inside the Bazarr container image — there is nothing to apt-get or pip-install on the host. They work by extracting the audio waveform of the video file and mathematically aligning the subtitle timestamps to where speech actually occurs, rather than relying on the (often wrong) release-name metadata.

!!! note "alass vs. ffsubsync" - alass is generally faster and handles subtitles with long gaps (e.g. silent intros, post-credit scenes) more gracefully. - ffsubsync is slightly more conservative and a good fallback if alass produces an obviously broken result on a specific file.

Either choice is fine — pick one and stay with it.

D. Language Profiles

Navigate to Languages -> Profiles and create a single dual-language profile called NL + EN, then assign it to every series in Sonarr and every movie in Radarr.

Inside the profile, order and configure the languages as follows:

Order Language Cutoff
1 Dutch ✅ (set cutoff here)
2 English

Why Dutch at the top with the cutoff on Dutch?

Bazarr treats the cutoff as "the target language — once this one is downloaded, stop searching the rest". By placing Dutch first and setting the cutoff on Dutch:

  • English is grabbed immediately when the file is first imported, because it is by far the most likely subtitle to be available on day one of a release. You can sit down and watch the episode tonight.
  • Dutch is upgraded in the background — Bazarr keeps searching for the Dutch track on its normal schedule and silently swaps it in once a Dutch provider publishes a matching .srt. The English copy is kept alongside it.
  • Searching stops once Dutch lands. With the cutoff on Dutch, Bazarr will not keep hammering providers indefinitely for a "better" track once the preferred language is in place.

The net effect is "watchable right now in English, eventually in Dutch" — which is exactly the desired bilingual-household behaviour.

E. Minimum Scores

Bazarr scores each subtitle candidate against the video file based on release group, source (BluRay / WEB-DL / HDTV), resolution, and other metadata. The default minimum score is low enough that a WEB-DL subtitle will routinely be applied to a BluRay release, producing a sub that is several seconds out of sync before the audio-sync step even runs.

Navigate to Settings -> Subtitles and raise the minimum scores to at least the following values:

Content type Minimum score
Movies 70
TV shows 80

This forces Bazarr to only accept subtitles where the source / release-group fingerprint actually matches the video file, preventing out-of-sync WEB-DL subs from being applied to BluRay rips (and vice versa). Anything that scores below the threshold is rejected and the search continues until a properly matched track is found — or, failing that, no track is applied rather than a wrong one.

Combined with the alass / ffsubsync step in section C, this produces subtitles that are correctly matched to the release and waveform-aligned to the audio, which is as good as automated subtitle delivery gets.