Bazarr is OK, but getting subtitles that are actually synced(and stay synced) to your particular video can be a pain.

I try to just grab things with subs already included.

Not a huge fan of correlating mental health and capitalist greed, personally.

I have been using Bazarr for that, it works well. Pretty much just set it and forget it, and subtitles are just.. there.

I use a plugin for Jellyfin (which I believe is available by default you just have to click the install option on the plugins page in your Dashboard) and manually download subtitles through the subtitles menu for an item if what I download doesn't include them.

It's in the help docs:

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/plugins/open-subtitles/

there's an opensubtitles plugin to search for subs and download them; you can also manually upload them by going to a library item, clicking the three dots, an selecting edit subtitles. you can search by clicking the magnifying glass or add your own by clicking the plus.

you can also just drop srts in the folder containing your item named like <name of media file>.en.srt.

haven't found a way to automatically download subs though :/

I've never downloaded a subtitle file since I started using it last year and all the videos I watch have subtitles 😅 I just thought that happened automatically 🙈

Check out bazarr, although that requires sonarr / radarr as well.

Something, something, ASS... files... something, something.

I'm old school, I just get the subs and integrate them with MkvToolNix. I was always super picky about my files, so I'd go in there and change around what the active/enabled/default streams were, give the streams better names (e.g. Stereo, Surround 5.1, whatever was appropriate — I never included the language, since the tag handled that). I'd even use en-us or en-gb if it was specifically one or the other (e.g. James Bond, Harry Potter for the latter). I even insisted my subtitles be in English for English movies, and American English for American English movies. So like, the word "honor" in a Harry Potter movie would not fly with me, it must say "honour" because... that's what the English specifically say. (Speaking of Harry Potter, no "Sorcerer's Stone" bullshit in my library, I have the "Philosopher's Stone" version because, of course I do. The first one was the only one with a regional title.)

So because of that, I can use Jellyfin and the subs work just fine.

I am familiar with Plex's auto sub downloader. Despite owning a lifetime Plex Pass, it would put ads in the subtitles. That may be on the site's end though, not Plex's.

Still a Plex user, and I'm on a Mac, but all this shit works whether you're a Windows user or a Mac user. Probably Linux, too. I tried Jellyfin recently. It's fine if your clients are running Android, but they are just not there on Apple devices yet. My computer (M2 Pro) is plenty powerful enough to run both servers (servers use very little resources when not serving) but I just don't see a need for Jellyfin in my rotation. I do root for the project though, I want it to succeed, so I'll try it every year or so.