Finding and removing fake subtitles

A recent trend that I absolutely hate is the inclusion of fake advertisement subtitles in pirated video releases. As a user and a fan of subtitles, this just presents me with extra steps when I actually want the correct subtitles for the media, I need to go about finding the original release name, then find the correct subtitle file before replacing the fake file. All in all, it’s a hassle I’d prefer not to have. Perhaps this is my fault for downloading horrible remux rips from horrible places in the first place.

A complete fake subtitle file will read a little something like this:

1
00:00:30,000 --> 00:00:36,000
Provided by YTS.MX

2
00:00:36,500 --> 00:00:42,000
Find the official YIFY movies site at
https://YTS.MX

3
00:30:30,000 --> 00:30:36,000
Downloaded from YTS.MX

4
01:00:30,000 --> 01:00:36,000
Download more movies for free
from YTS.MX

Anyway, we can find these and similar files using the following command:

find . -type f -iname "*.srt" -size -4096c -exec grep YTS -l {} \;

This will search the current directory for any files that end in .srt, are below 4KB in size, and specifically contain the text string YTS which is the main offender.

With these results you can manually check the files and delete them if you’d like.