The addon (like Seren or Umbrella ) identifies the video.
If you are playing a locally downloaded file or a stream from an addon that hasn't properly "scraped" movie info, the IMDB ID is missing from Kodi's internal player data. a4ksubtitles imdb id not provided
How to Fix the "a4kSubtitles IMDb ID Not Provided" Error in Kodi The addon (like Seren or Umbrella ) identifies the video
Without the ID, the add-on effectively says: “I don’t know what you’re watching, so I can’t look up subtitles.” You are left with no subtitles unless you manually download them externally. The error is not a bug in the subtitle add-on
The error is not a bug in the subtitle add-on. It is a polite error message telling you: "I can’t guess which subtitles you need. Please give me the exact movie identifier."
This service generally does not work on live TV streams because they lack the fixed IMDb identifiers assigned to recorded movies and shows. How to Fix the Error