Recommendations for dual subtitle media players wanted

[Doitsujin]

Recommendations for dual subtitle media players wanted

So far I've been using PotPlayer, which works fine.
IIRC, when I first installed it, I added some entries to the Windows hosts files that supposedly block ads. I don't know if it's still showing ads, though. (I also tested KMPlayer and GOM Player but didn't like them.)

Theoretically, VLC and MPV are also capable of displaying dual subtitles, but I haven't tested this.

I'm looking for apps similar to Language Reactor that have been optimized for subtitle-based language learning and support local .mkv files.
So far I've only found two apps, but both have some deficiencies that make them useless for my purposes.

1. asbplayer (browser extension)
Problems:

• Doesn't work with mkv files in Firefox and Chrome and in Edge it'll only play the audio.
• Enabling mkv audio stream selection requires changes to advanced Edge settings. (edge://flags > Experimental Web Platform features > Enabled).
• Dictionary lookup only for Asian languages.

2. Lingo Player
Problems:

• "Abandonware"
• No menu for selecting audio streams in .mkv files. (Defaults to first audio stream.)
• Google Translate dictionary lookup is broken.

Are there any other similar apps that have not been optimized for learning Asian languages?

[kundalini]

Not exactly what you're looking for, but this website has an option to merge two subtitles into a single one:

https://subtitletools.com/

[garyb]

MPV works with MKV audio and subtitle tracks as well as external subtitle files, although AFAIK you have to run it from the command line: once to print a list of the available subtitles and audio tracks and their IDs, then again with options to specify the preferred audio track and primary and secondary subtitles.

VLC supports them in Version 4, but version 4 has been in development for years and whenever I've tried a nightly build it's been completely unusable, as in even very basic playback functionality (pause, rewind, etc.) didn't work even if the subtitles did show. I've not tried for a year or so though, so maybe you'd have better luck now.

Congrats on even getting Lingo Player to run!

I've also used websites/applications to merge subtitles like the one kundalini mentioned, and they can work quite well if the subtitle files are well-matched. The one I used (it might've been part of subs2srs, but I don't remember now) had a lot of options for the style and position of each subtitle track.

Sadly these options won't give you all the nice learner-oriented features of Language Reactor etc. like hover-translations, but they're better than nothing.

[Kraut]

Try what you can get with SMPlayer.

I think this one was originally an mkv audio file by Deutsche Welle that I converted to an MP4 file. Which I then put in Riverside to get the German audio subtitles. Which I then translated with Claude 3.5 Sonnet into Spanish.
Rather complicated.
But apart from this rare case SMPlayer is excellent: you can change size, colour .. it has an easy snapshot function.

[Doitsujin]

I think this one was originally an mkv audio file by Deutsche Welle that I converted to an MP4 file. Which I then put in Riverside to get the German audio subtitles. Which I then translated with Claude 3.5 Sonnet into Spanish.
Rather complicated.

I found out by chance yesterday that the current version of Potplayer supports on-the-fly translations of text-based subtitle files with Google Translate. (It also shows other engines in the translation menu but they don't seem to work.)
I.e. it's possible to display an .srt file at the bottom (1) a Google translation above it (2) and the original English VOBSUB subtitle (3) at the top. Since I'm still a beginner, I find the English back-translation helpful in understanding the syntax of the translation.

subtitles.png

[Kraut]

That looks useful and quick,the following takes more time.

I have done a few experiments with subtitles and AI in the past.

Once you have the subtitle file of a video you can ask a chatbot to do creative tasks to your liking: a translation into other languages .. or like in this case a paraphrase of what is said in subtitle 1. This can be useful for material like the Dreaming Spanish videos that come without additional tasks.
Here is one: "Spanish Man Does Laundry". The AI chatbot is Claude Sonnet 3.5, the prompt is "Explain the overall meaning of this phrase or text in your own Spanish words and keep the timestamps."