So I'm trying to improve my English speaking skill by shadowing while watching TV episodes. The workflow before was to loop over video clips using mpv:
-
hit
lto mark the start of the loop -
play the video and wait for it to be at the end of the loop
-
hit
lagain to mark the end
Then mpv will loop over the clip, it basically works, but it's a bit hard and tedious to set the start and end precisely.
Recently, I came up with an idea that I can practice language-speaking using subtitle files, as they already have the timestamps along with subtitle texts. I can loop over specific parts of a video file easily by taking advantage of those timestamps instead of manually setting the start time and end time of the playback and then looping over it.
And then I thought of a package, subed, which caught my eyes when I was lurking around Sacha Chua's blog site. And I found that it was perfect for this idea after playing with it for ~10 minutes.
Here are the steps:
-
Open a subtitle file, say
/path/to/foo.srt, subed will automatically open the accompanying video file having the name foo.mp4/foo.mk4/foo.avi, etc. using mpv. -
Then, in the subtitle buffer, only these three key bindings will do the job:
-
C-c C-ltoggles looping over the current subtitle By default, there is an extra second before and after the time span, as specified in the configsubed-loop-seconds-before&subed-loop-seconds-after. -
M-nmoves the point to the next subtitle, and it automatically seeks the playback to the corresponding timeline. -
M-pmoves the point to the previous subtitle and seeks the playback to the correct position of the timeline.
-
Although the package is designed to edit subtitles efficiently, it could also shine in language shadowing and speaking.
If you're also learning to speak foreign languages, I believe this workflow can help you.✌
Also on:
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Reddit /r/emacs