I used to save movies with the srt subtitle files next to them.

Usually vlc finds it because it's on the same directory than the movie file, however with git annex the link is located on another folder. So after adding movies to git, the subtitles doesn't load anymore.

couldn't find a quick fix. I'm thinking a bash script, but wanted to discuss it here with all annex users.

I know It's out of annex scope, but I think a movie archive is a great scenario for git-annex. most of my HD is filled up with movies from the camcorder, screencast, etc... And we usually don't modify those files

From what you say, it seems that vlc is following the symlink to the movie content, and then looking for subtitles next to the file the symlink points to. It would have to explicitly realpath the symlink to have this behavior, and this sounds like a misfeature.. perhaps you could point out to the vlc people the mistake in doing so?

There's a simple use-case where this behavior is obviously wrong, without involving git-annex. Suppose I have a movie, and one version of subtitles for it, in directory foo. I want to modify the subtitles, so I make a new directory bar, symlink the large movie file from foo to save space, and copy over and edit the subtitles from foo. Now I run vlc in bar to test my new subtitles. If it ignores the locally present subtitles and goes off looking for the ones in bar, I say this is broken behavior.

Comment by http://joey.kitenet.net/ Fri Dec 23 16:16:19 2011
Since subtitle files are typically pretty small, a workaround is to simply check them into git directly, and only use git-annex for the movies. (Or git annex unannex the ones you've already annexed.)
Comment by http://joey.kitenet.net/ Fri Dec 23 18:43:05 2011
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