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Comment on Show HN: Kontext – Learn new words by watching movies in a foreign language

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I can't get it to load and the "about" isn't terribly informative, but (I think) I made a proof of concept of a similar thing. Mine is an offline video player that shows dual language subtitles. It has modes for skipping non-dialog sections, repeating the same dialog section, and slowing down playback.

What killed it, though, was a near impossibility of finding a movie that wasn't edited differently in each language (causing at least one of the audio track or language tracks to be out of sync or otherwise unmergeable). Maybe that was just an issue with Mandarin and other languages have better availability, but for me it ended up just being an endless swamp of comparing subtitle files to see if they were different, screwing around with time offsets, and eventually giving up. The player itself worked, albeit with a terrible UI, I just couldn't find more than a handful (OK, actually only one: Lost in Thailand) movies + dual sets of matching subtitle tracks to use it with.

If anybody has a solution to this I'd love to be able to use it again and even willing to post a cleaned up version if there is interest.

I also had vague thoughts of looking at the youtube API to see if there's a solution there for videos that already have multiple subtitle languages, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

Most of the information is on the landing page now. Congratulations for your app, but no, mine is not for that. Please read my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17627899

Also, take a look at this, it is related to your problem: https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/8ue04x/le...

If you still have time, please explain what happened exactly, how and where didn't it load for you?

Same as Inanek2. Looks like maybe related to this (Firefox 52.8 on Linux, from China, via VPN):

Blocked loading mixed active content “http://www.opensubtitles.org/en/captcha2/redirect-%7Cen%7Cdo... More] app.kontext.xyz Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://dl.opensubtitles.org/en/download/src-api/vrf-19bf0c5.... (Reason: CORS header ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’ missing). (unknown) Error: XHR error vendor.c1d3cea4dc48e57eff24.js:333:26904 GET https://www.google-analytics.com/collect [HTTP/2.0 200 OK 355ms]

From the error message, it seems that it really didn't load, Inanek2 had different problem (I think).

That "captcha" part in the request to OpenSubtitles.org is strange, I will ask them about it. You should try it later, maybe it is some sort of rate-limiting as a lot of people started using the app after I posted on HN.

Gr8 idea and sorry that you tried so hard.

Did you consider taking an open source mp like vlc and modifying, I assume that would be simpler and more scalable.

1) it used VLC, called from the command line. arrow keys, space bar and a few letter keys for mode and navigation.

2) I downloaded from various places. If you can post a link I'll check it out, but based on past experience the subtitles for one market only match that release of that market's movie, and go out of sync with any foreign release. For example, if you have a Chinese movie with English subtitles it was probably edited for release in an English speaking market and won't match any Chinese subtitles you might find since they would go with the Chinese release.

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