Full Changelog: v2.5.4-beta...v2.5.5-beta
What's New in v2.5.5-beta
This beta focuses heavily on reliability, subtitle validation and making Babel safer to leave running unattended.
Subtitle Trust & Bazarr
- New subtitle trust engine for validating target subtitles before Babel accepts them.
- Improved Bazarr coordination and lifecycle tracking.
- Safer handling of subtitles that appear while Bazarr is still searching.
- Babel can now detect and safely repair constant subtitle timing offsets when there is enough evidence.
- Incorrect releases, progressive drift and unsafe timing mismatches are rejected instead of being silently accepted.
- Trusted Bazarr subtitles can be repaired and adopted without using AI.
Translation & Quality
- Added Custom Translation Instructions, allowing you to control translation style and behaviour alongside the existing glossary.
- Improved recovery for dropped or untranslated subtitle cues.
- Better fail-safe handling when individual lines cannot be recovered.
- Stronger QA and publication checks to prevent incomplete or unsafe subtitles from being written.
- Improved SDH cleaning and classification performance.
Source Selection
- Major improvements to embedded subtitle detection and source preparation.
- Faster cached scanning of embedded subtitle tracks.
- Better handling of races between embedded sources, Bazarr and AI fallback.
- More reliable source acquisition when several possible subtitle sources exist.
Languages
- Added first-class Brazilian Portuguese (pt-BR) support.
- Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese are now handled as separate target languages across Babel, Bazarr and DeepL.
Activity & UI
- Activity Feed can now be filtered by status.
- Added server-side sorting by time, duration, lines, status and source.
- Improved library scanning status and embedded subtitle progress reporting.
Sonarr / Radarr
- Improved webhook setup and documentation.
- Babel now clearly targets On File Import and On File Upgrade events.
- Webhook secrets can be supplied either through the URL or custom header.
Reliability
- Improved retry and deferred-job handling.
- Safer publication arbitration when Bazarr and Babel finish around the same time.
- Better protection against duplicate translations and duplicate AI work.
- Expanded regression coverage for real-world subtitle timing, Bazarr and recovery issues.
v2.5.5-beta is primarily a reliability release. The goal is simple: Babel should make better decisions about when to trust an existing subtitle, when it can safely repair one, and when AI translation is actually necessary.