DivxPlanet (Altyazı.org)

» see altyazi.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

A Turkish subtitle file is about forty kilobytes of plain text: two timestamps with the words that belong between them, repeated a thousand times. That is the whole object. For roughly ten years, whether a foreign film existed in Turkey for most people depended on whether one of those files had been made, and the place they were made was this site.

It started in 2004 under the name divxplanet.com, after the codec that had just made it possible to fit a feature film on a single CD. The domain itself was older and had been sitting parked: the earliest thing the archive holds for it is 1 August 2003, a page that says divxplanet.com is under construction above a column of casino links. The real site grew into the largest subtitle library in the language, organized like a library rather than a dump, with every version of a release listed and a credit line for whoever did the work.

By 2009 Hürriyet was counting 55,000 registered members, somewhere between 150 and 200 thousand visitors a day, and more than a million subtitle downloads in the preceding year. The founder used the handle Neottoman and had a standing answer for the legality question, which was that he was not selling anyone a film, he was handing out subtitles. He also pointed out that some official DVD releases in Turkey shipped translations his members had written.

This one is close to home in the plainest way. In Turkey in the DivX years you did not watch a foreign film without a file somebody had typed for free, and there was one obvious place to get it. I cannot tell you which translations I ended up reading, because nobody who used the site can. The credit line at the bottom of a subtitle scrolls past in half a second.

~ the dossier ~

~ the translators ~

The work was unpaid and treated as a hobby, and the translators were not employees of anything. They pushed the same file to several sites at once, so the archive was less a company than a place where a scattered group of people agreed to keep their output. A serious translator would time the lines to a specific release, argue about idiom in the comments, and then do it again next week for nothing.

That model has one structural weakness, and it is not legal. Volunteers cost nothing but servers do. A community of that size generates bandwidth bills every month and generates no revenue at all unless somebody sells advertising against it, which is exactly where this ended up.

~ the legal question ~

Turkey never resolved what a subtitle file is. It is not the film. It is a translation of dialog nobody licensed, distributed for free, and useful mainly to someone who already has a copy of something they probably should not have. Rights holders in several countries went after subtitle sites directly, most famously in Sweden, and Turkish press covering the closure said openly that it was not clear whether legal pressure or plain economics had done it.

The team's own account, quoted from a forum post at the time, was money. Advertising had been dropped, the people running it were covering the hosting themselves, and eventually the ones covering it stopped.

~ the first week of february ~

The name changed first. In late 2014 the site moved to altyazi.org, dropping the reference to a codec that had become historical, and the archive's first full page at the new address is 11 November 2014. Two years of normal operation follow.

The last complete capture is 5 January 2017. On 15 February the server answers with a 521, the error a host returns when there is nothing behind it anymore. In between, in the first week of February, the Twitter account said it was over. By March the domain was serving a stub of under a kilobyte, and the announcement was carried by Turkish tech press on 7 February 2017.

~ where the crowd went ~

Communities of that kind do not evaporate, they fork. Regulars pointed each other at planetdp.org, which took the initials of the old name and is still running today, and a large part of the translator population had already been publishing to turkcealtyazi.org for years. Both are alive. The archive that held them together is not, and neither of the domains it used answers.

What actually got lost is the index. Individual subtitles survive in a hundred mirrors and torrent packs, including a bulk backup of the series section that somebody uploaded to the Internet Archive. What no longer exists is the thing that made it usable: one page per film, every version listed, with a name next to each translation.

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