Hi,
I'd love to watch videos in a Pleco "Video" module and be able to lookup up subtitled words. (I'm not the first person to request this functionality). I know there's other functionality that has higher priority, but if this kind of functionality was developed, it would be awesome (and as an add-on, I'd pay good money for it).
I recognize that developing this kind of functionality is easier said than done, but I'm wondering whether there exists today APIs and frameworks (at least on the iOS side) that would make this more feasible (and of course we have much more powerful hardware than just a few years ago).
Subtitles are either "burned" into a video or accompany a video in a text file (AFAIK there are binary-based subtitle formats, but let's ignore them for now). I'm going to assume that parsing a video file with burned subtitles is a non-starter (i.e., computationally intensive, low accuracy, not worth the time/effort to develop, etc.) It would be great, then, if I could load a video within Pleco and simply point it to the accompanying text-based subtitle file (ASS, SRT, and maybe SubRip are the most popular formats(?)).
In terms of interacting/selecting subtitles for lookup, the most elegant approach is simply tapping a word in the video subtitle text to select it (i.e., just like in Pleco reader; perhaps you have to pause the video to do this). And just like in Pleco reader, I could choose to add that word to a flashcard category, etc.
Right now I watch subtitled videos on my computer and have to jump through an annoying set of hoops to find a word's definition in Pleco. It would be so much better if I could do all of this from within Pleco itself.
Note: I would not expect Pleco to support any kind of subtitle editing - assume that any editing of the subtitle file, sync'ing it with the source video, etc., all happens on an computer (using a program like Aegisub, etc).
Thanks!
Edit: at a bare minimum, even functionality that would allow me to load a subtitle file in Pleco and navigate the file by timecode would be nice (navigation controls can include scrolling within the file; jumping to a specific time; or skipping forwards/backwards by time intervals (i.e., like what a lot of podcast players allow you to do). In this way I can quickly jump to a specific point in the file and look up the words that I'm seeing in the video.
I'd love to watch videos in a Pleco "Video" module and be able to lookup up subtitled words. (I'm not the first person to request this functionality). I know there's other functionality that has higher priority, but if this kind of functionality was developed, it would be awesome (and as an add-on, I'd pay good money for it).
I recognize that developing this kind of functionality is easier said than done, but I'm wondering whether there exists today APIs and frameworks (at least on the iOS side) that would make this more feasible (and of course we have much more powerful hardware than just a few years ago).
Subtitles are either "burned" into a video or accompany a video in a text file (AFAIK there are binary-based subtitle formats, but let's ignore them for now). I'm going to assume that parsing a video file with burned subtitles is a non-starter (i.e., computationally intensive, low accuracy, not worth the time/effort to develop, etc.) It would be great, then, if I could load a video within Pleco and simply point it to the accompanying text-based subtitle file (ASS, SRT, and maybe SubRip are the most popular formats(?)).
In terms of interacting/selecting subtitles for lookup, the most elegant approach is simply tapping a word in the video subtitle text to select it (i.e., just like in Pleco reader; perhaps you have to pause the video to do this). And just like in Pleco reader, I could choose to add that word to a flashcard category, etc.
Right now I watch subtitled videos on my computer and have to jump through an annoying set of hoops to find a word's definition in Pleco. It would be so much better if I could do all of this from within Pleco itself.
Note: I would not expect Pleco to support any kind of subtitle editing - assume that any editing of the subtitle file, sync'ing it with the source video, etc., all happens on an computer (using a program like Aegisub, etc).
Thanks!
Edit: at a bare minimum, even functionality that would allow me to load a subtitle file in Pleco and navigate the file by timecode would be nice (navigation controls can include scrolling within the file; jumping to a specific time; or skipping forwards/backwards by time intervals (i.e., like what a lot of podcast players allow you to do). In this way I can quickly jump to a specific point in the file and look up the words that I'm seeing in the video.
Last edited:
