substudy: Make Anki cards and other resources from video & bilingual subtitles (command-line)

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Re: substudy: A tool for making bilingual subtitles (MacOS X or Linux, command-line)

Postby emk » Tue Dec 08, 2015 9:02 pm

OK, this screenshot looks a lot like the last one, but there's a lot more happening under the hood:

lang-substudy-player-checkboxes.png

The checkboxes can be used to mark specific subtitles. You can't do anything with the marked subtitles yet, but we're getting there. More usefully:

  • You can double-click on a subtitle to jump to that subtitle.
  • You can pause or play the video using the spacebar.
  • You can skip backwards or forwards 5 seconds by using the arrow keys.
This is still rather primitive, but it's starting to be useful. And I can think of some nice features to build from here. But more importantly, does anybody else have a wishlist for a language-learner's video player? :-)
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Re: substudy: A tool for making bilingual subtitles (MacOS X or Linux, command-line)

Postby rdearman » Tue Dec 08, 2015 10:10 pm

The only thing i could think of was a loop function, so i could just repeat the dialogue a couple of times.
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Re: substudy: A tool for making bilingual subtitles (MacOS X or Linux, command-line)

Postby emk » Tue Dec 08, 2015 11:52 pm

rdearman wrote:The only thing i could think of was a loop function, so i could just repeat the dialogue a couple of times.

Good idea! I normally use the "skip back 5 seconds" and "skip forward 5 seconds" features to replay things manually, but an actual looping mode would certainly be useful.

Now I can show all the subtitles I've marked anywhere in an episode or movie:

lang-substudy-showing-selected-subs.png

All I would really need at this point would be an "Export as cards" button, but that's going to require a significant overhaul of the code base, which will need to wait. In the meantime, maybe I'll watch Matando Cabos. :-)

Does anybody else have any wishlist features that they've always wanted to see in a video player? I'm definitely going to read everybody's suggestions and think about them a lot!
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Re: substudy: A tool for making bilingual subtitles (MacOS X or Linux, command-line)

Postby rdearman » Wed Dec 09, 2015 12:29 am

Another suggest might be the ability to toggle between audio languages. In a mkv file for example i might toggle between english and french or Italian. I can see it being useful to highlight a couple of subtitles and flip between L1 and L2. Although this might only be useful for someone learning L3 through L2?

The ability to speed up or slowdown playback, for use with shadowing perhaps. The ability to bookmark. Someway to block select subtitles between x minute and y minute and loop play, or export that selection as an mp3?

Select a word in a subtitle and do a dictionary lookup?
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Re: substudy: A tool for making bilingual subtitles (MacOS X or Linux, command-line)

Postby arthaey » Wed Dec 09, 2015 4:43 am

Very awesome-looking! I'm really looking forward to using this.

Wishlist-wise:
  • Export as cards/CSV. ;)
    • Export audio + text.
    • Export just a screenshot + text, ie without any audio.
  • Toggle which language(s) subtitles are shown. I can see wanting only the L2 to display, but if I'm stuck on a particular line, I'd want to toggle on my L1.
  • Timer to track time spent studying. Bonus if broken down by video playing vs not.
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Re: substudy: A tool for making bilingual subtitles (MacOS X or Linux, command-line)

Postby emk » Wed Dec 09, 2015 3:49 pm

Thank you for the suggestions!

The way I'm going to handle this is to read through all the suggestions, and try to pick out a set of features which is nice and clean and easy to understand, and which works well for language learners. But I can't think of all the good ideas myself, and different people have different needs, so I really appreciate the ideas.

rdearman wrote:Another suggest might be the ability to toggle between audio languages. In a mkv file for example i might toggle between english and french or Italian. I can see it being useful to highlight a couple of subtitles and flip between L1 and L2.

Unfortunately, this would require a browser with video tracks support, which basically only means Safari and the newest IE at this point. :-(

rdearman wrote:The ability to speed up or slowdown playback, for use with shadowing perhaps.

Oooh, yes, I've been thinking about this, and I think it would be a great addition. We totally want this.

rdearman wrote:Someway to block select subtitles between x minute and y minute and loop play, or export that selection as an mp3?

You can turn a movie into short MP3 tracks using the "substudy export tracks" command, and then grab any interesting tracks and make a playlist. Does this seem like it might meet your needs?

rdearman wrote:Select a word in a subtitle and do a dictionary lookup?

This should already work if you have the readlang plugin or something similar installed! :-) I want to make sure that we don't break any of the popular dictionary/translation plugins.

arthaey wrote:Export as cards/CSV. ;)

Planned!

arthaey wrote:
  • Export audio + text.
  • Export just a screenshot + text, ie without any audio.

Interesting! Could you please explain your use case for me? One option would be to just do the usual export to CSV, but only import the fields and files you want into Anki. Exporting to CSV is actually fairly quick—about 2.5 minutes for a complete movie, on my laptop, and we can probably speed that up.

arthaey wrote:Toggle which language(s) subtitles are shown. I can see wanting only the L2 to display, but if I'm stuck on a particular line, I'd want to toggle on my L1.

I was thinking of a mode where all subtitles are hidden, but if you hit "skip back", the subtitles will automatically activate for 10 seconds or so. Right now, I'm making the L1 subtitles small and grey, so they're easy to filter out visually. But if you find that they're still distracting in practice, I'd love to know about it.

arthaey wrote:Timer to track time spent studying. Bonus if broken down by video playing vs not.

Now that's a good idea. :-)

Thank you for all the suggestions! I think the next step (for this coming weekend) is that I need to work on the player UI, and make it more pleasant to watch a movie while studying the subs. There are still a lot of rough edges right now.
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Re: substudy: A tool for making bilingual subtitles (MacOS X or Linux, command-line)

Postby arthaey » Wed Dec 09, 2015 4:00 pm

emk wrote:
arthaey wrote:
  • Export audio + text.
  • Export just a screenshot + text, ie without any audio.

Interesting! Could you please explain your use case for me? One option would be to just do the usual export to CSV, but only import the fields and files you want into Anki. Exporting to CSV is actually fairly quick—about 2.5 minutes for a complete movie, on my laptop, and we can probably speed that up.

I've never actually done audio cards before, because:
  • I generally dislike listening to audio vs reading text,
  • audio takes up more file space,
  • reviewing audio (probably?) takes longer, and
  • I have to be in private (or have headphones) to review audio.
But you're right, I could selectively import fields and experiment for myself to see if these assumptions actually hold up in practice.

emk wrote:
arthaey wrote:Toggle which language(s) subtitles are shown. I can see wanting only the L2 to display, but if I'm stuck on a particular line, I'd want to toggle on my L1.

I was thinking of a mode where all subtitles are hidden, but if you hit "skip back", the subtitles will automatically activate for 10 seconds or so. Right now, I'm making the L1 subtitles small and grey, so they're easy to filter out visually. But if you find that they're still distracting in practice, I'd love to know about it.

Let's also defer this one until I've used the tool for a bit, to see if it's actually distracting in practice.

I was trying to brainstorm possible features, not suggest only dealbreaker-features. ;)
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Re: substudy: A tool for making bilingual subtitles (MacOS X or Linux, command-line)

Postby emk » Wed Dec 09, 2015 5:31 pm

arthaey wrote:Let's also defer this one until I've used the tool for a bit, to see if it's actually distracting in practice.

I was trying to brainstorm possible features, not suggest only dealbreaker-features. ;)

I actually really appreciate the suggestions. :-)

My overall goal here is to have a really simple interface, and to guide the user towards especially productive language-learning strategies. But things that work for me might not work for other people, and so I'm trying to collect as much data as possible.

Once I have the data, there are two things I can do with it:

  1. Add more buttons to the UI, or more command-line flags.
  2. Try to find a clever solution where the software does the right thing by default.
When possible, I prefer (2) over (1). For example, substudy includes an encoding detector and a natural language detector, so that I don't have to ask lots of questions about Latin-1 versus Latin-15 versus UTF-8, or ask the user to specify track numbers all over the place. Instead, the software tries really hard to figure this stuff out on its own. Similarly with the GUI: If there's a way to do something without adding a bunch of buttons, I'll probably prefer it. :-)

But I can't find clever solutions unless I have a very good grasp of what other people need in order to learn effectively. So I'm really interested in use cases and first hand experiences.
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Re: substudy: A tool for making bilingual subtitles (MacOS X or Linux, command-line)

Postby rdearman » Wed Dec 09, 2015 8:53 pm

Probably a stupid question. But having build the executable before you added in more stuff is there an easy way to upgrade? All I did was delete the executable and rebuild.

I'm guessing you haven't released the tracks functionality yet, because that option doesn't exist for me. The --help doesn't show a version number, it might be useful to add that in.

:D
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Re: substudy: A tool for making bilingual subtitles (MacOS X or Linux, command-line)

Postby emk » Wed Dec 09, 2015 9:48 pm

rdearman wrote:Probably a stupid question. But having build the executable before you added in more stuff is there an easy way to upgrade? All I did was delete the executable and rebuild.

Ah, annoyingly, it turns out that I haven't actually released that yet. I'll try to get to that this evening or tomorrow, and I'll let you know.

Once I release a new version, you can just follow any of the install steps listed here and it should install the update for you.
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