I wanted to show a little app I’m working on and possibly get your feedback on it. I used to use a site called Animelon but one day it just stopped working properly, i was told about another site but you cant register on it so only episode 1 of everything is viewable!
I really liked the concept of both, but neither had given me a viable long term clean study tool so I set out to make my own with some twists (For the better i hope and that’s what I’m here to find out today)
So i want to introduce Anime Video Player, its a dual subtitle video player which puts the focus on the Japanese subtitle, you can highlight any word, text, phrase and it will be broken down into Hiragana (to help with readings) as well as google translated using the translate API to give you ‘the gist’ then you have links to Jisho J>E Dictionary and Yahoo’s J>J Dictionary.
Finally a little flashcard button which renders the video frame along with the context of the frame into fields so you can easily create sentence cards in your anki desks.
I have some settings included for things like adjusting subtitle offsets on both a Japanese and English basis separate to the video, and a play pause on highlight option so you can play the video and have it stop when you highlight a subtitle but auto continue when you move the mouse away.
It’s not currently released as i am still actively working on it. But i was hoping to gather some initial feedback, share the tool with you, gauge interest and possibly gather some suggestions if any
EDIT: Just to clarify, the google translate is not for getting the ‘translation’ but just for guiding the viewer looking at ‘what is X word’ or ‘what does this grammar point do for Y word’ the combination of English subtitles, Japanese subtitles and being able to pick at words with google translate seemed helpful to me for correctly identifying how and why the sentence works. (Obviously, don’t rely on the AI Translation to be the main source of information here its just for “The Gist”)
seems like a cool idea, but if you are relying on google translate you are going to have weird translations, like the sample one is also incorrect. You can turn off the English subtitles right?
Of course, I think I maybe explained it wrong the google translate is not for learning but for ‘the gist’ when you’re a low level beginner like me looking at the Japanese, reading the English and then using google translate to highlight words and see specifically what ‘this word’ means or what does ‘this specific grammar do on this word’ and how they function in the sentence more than anything.
Obviously not to rely on the google translation for an accurate ‘correct’ meaning but just a guide to point the student in the right direction
Edit: I’ve updated the main post, to hopefully clear that up
Edit: Regarding turning off the subtitles, yes they can be individually turned on and off in the settings menu screenshots are a bit old
Thank you yep this is the exact type of use case i had hoped to improve the flow of pausing, gathering the data and continuing on with the video before i’d lost the continuity of my episodes
It seems like a cool program, but just be aware that there already exists Voracious, which has similar functionality. That said, I think I prefer your interface design over theirs.
I’ll still continue developing this because after looking at the screenshots it looks a little clunky and i really enjoy having true google translate integrated because you can just click/drag and boom reasonably good translation including grammar and stuff like that.
But I’m very curious how their dictionary is working, Google Api comes with a bit of a cost so it would be awesome to find a free-er way of doing the lookups
I hope I didn’t spoil your enthusiasm. As I’ve already said, I like your interface more.
I’m also currently working on a similar tool and dreading the day when I realize that someone else has done exactly the same before.
Not at all I am more motivated now haha as a student of japanese and a software engineer there is one thing that gets me going and that’s optimization.
Can we optimize the study process? can we make learning easier… faster… better… more efficient now that i know theres another tool out there I have to work twice… nay thrice as hard to not only make a second but make something that can do everything better to “Push the genre” so to speak.
Slightly offtopic, but where do you find japanese subtitles? I don’t really need a specific program for it but I’d love to know a place where I could get sub files. Right now I try to just watch stuff without anything but having japanese subs would be great.
I’ve been using subtitles from http://kitsunekko.net/ they don’t have everything but they have a LOT! the other place (dont know if they still have them) was the d-addicts forums.
Also if you search in google for like “Dragon Ball Z S01E01 SRT ASS VTT” you’ll often find smaller blogs that host them
I always love projects like these! Very cool. For me the real value add would be to be able to watch the anime on the internet with the subtitles. That would be the most convenient. I thought I had found this when I found daiweeb.org but it doesn’t seem to work anymore .
Daiweeb and animelon are the two main reasons I’m making this.
I loved both, but a little bit clunky interfaces, frequent downtime (assumed because they are hosting technically illegal materials and their server providers boot them out)
So I wish I could turn it into a website with hosted media and pre-timed subtitles etc but its a lawsuit waiting to happen.
With this In mind, I think the best we can do is a stand alone video player
Using a mixture of node, angular7, electronjs, and firebase so its basically a website but since its running on node locally I have about as much power as anything native (ie local file access, parsing subtitles etc)
Using a custom wrapper on top of the html5 video player to do all of the play back which gives pretty good compatibility basically all of my locally stored avi’s mp4’s mkv’s etc are working.
And yes, it will work on Windows, Mac and Linux as native binaries
Absolutely will keep the thread updated as progress is made this weekend I started to refactor the whole thing.
Put all the data providers and helper functions into services etc etc so nothing really to ‘show’ but i think in a week or two I’ll be ready to open up the main site.
Also I changed the name and registered the domain “Viewpoly” that’s view for watch, poly for polyglot and I’ve refactored the whole translation engine so it now asks what languages you want to work in so its not just limited to Japanese.
but you could also do say Japanese to Korean for you clever cookies out there doing multiple languages. (edit: or any other language that you want like Spanish, French, German etc)
I don’t know I you were aware of this tool, the advantage of been a webpage for me is that i get to use Yomichan, an quickly decide if it worth adding a given word (frequency based) . Your snapshot looks quite like it … though neither Voracious or this page have any tool for re-sync subs, there you have the edge
Personally I’m not a big fan of automated translations. Been able to have Yomichan should be enough imho…
.
. Your snapshot looks quite like it 