Does not work with Migaku? How to get it to work?

[825i]

What is the issue and what do you do to make it happen
Playing anything with asbplayer; the subtitlkes work, but I cannot use Migaku for dictionary lookups from the subtitle, nor does pitch accent colouring or furigana work from within the video subtitle.

What browser?
Brave and Chrome

Is it happening with local video or streaming video?
Local video

Screenshot

Shown below, the subtitles are formatted and highlighted in the right-hand sidebar,
but not properly formatted with Migaku's features like furigana and work lookup etc.

Sorry if I am doing something wrong here, but based on other replies this seems that it should work.

[825i]

The latest update to Migaku Early Access Extension February 28, 2025 v1.24.0-earlyaccess.1

Does not even any longer highlight the words on the right side (as shown above)... nor of course does it work from within the video either (same as above shown). Furthermore, there is no longer an option for the toolbar to open (at all) at the top of the page to be pinned. So it acts as though there is nothing on the page to even watch... even though Migaku has been enabled on the page.

So this is now even worse than before. Can this please get looked at? 🙏

@killergerbah

[killergerbah]

@825i do you know about when this started happening? I can try to correlate the issue with a change that happened on the asbplayer side.

[825i]

Hi thanks a lot for replying. I have no idea when it started happening. I only started using asbplayer on the day that I made this ticket and saw immediately that it was not working properly. If there's anything in particular you want me to check please let me know. I'll do my best to help get this working.

I think the main thing though is that Migaku is not acting like there is anything on the page for it to recognise as subtitles. Compared to other pages like eg. Netflix and Youtube. The toolbar isn't really responding to the subtitles being loaded. I have also tried on a fresh browser (Chrome) with no other addons at all and it seems to affect Migaku entirely regardless of the version.

EDIT: To give more clarification it seems that: Migaku v1.23.0-earlyaccess.1 extension was highlighting (parsing) the text on the left side properly (but not the subs on the video). However, the latest v1.24.0-earlyaccess.1 version does not do either things.

[killergerbah]

Okay thanks.
I can practically think of only one large change that could have caused this issue, and unfortunately I will not be rolling it back. Without access to a Migaku subscription or source code it's hard to make progress on debugging this issue. You might have better luck asking the Migaku team to fix the problem.

[825i]

@killergerbah

Hi, I have actually spoken with the Migaku team and they are aware that it does not work but said they have no intention to fix things. It's not on their roadmap and they don't have the manpower to even investigate.

In this case I would like to avoid any kind of anti-pattern back-and-forth or "bad blood" between you and them. Would it be acceptable to gift you a subscription to Migaku? I would be happy to pay for one for you, under the pretense that you would fix this issue.

As far as I am concerned, the fact that asbplayer does not work with Migaku is completely unacceptable. I don't mean this in any kind of condesending or blameful manner at all (so I am not pointing the finger at either party). Rather, I mean in the case that there is no reason simply why it should not work at all given the circumstances. I also don't see the reason why either Migaku (or you) would choose to have nothing to do with each other when you are for all intensive purposes working toward the same goal of trying to help people with language immersion. You're benefiting them and they are benefiting you (but only if both your services play nice haha). So if at all possible I can agree to help you at least with the needed subscription.

In this case because I cannot convince Migaku to work on this and I am swamped with my own projects (check my own Github profile activity) (and would need to work backward anyway to figure out how asbplayer works so I could submit my own PR).

I can therefore agree to pay for a subscription for you, under the pretext that you will ensure asbplayer fully supports Migaku extension. This is not the same as donating to you on Ko-Fi. It would come with what I consider the reasonable expectation that you fix this problem. Not just for me personally either, but to the benefit of many. I understand you are too, a busy software engineer, and I would not impose a timeframe anyway but hopefully you get my meaning.

Is this acceptable? I could even agree to pay for up to 12 months. Which comes with the again the reasonable expectation that within the timeframe that after you fix it, if it breaks again (by changes from either party (you or them)) you'd do whatever necessary to prioritize fixing it on your side.

I doubt it's going to be a significantly difficult fix either, now or in the future. It's likely just something simple to get the Migaku's extension to properly format the subtitles. As it seems likely now that your own logic for showing subtitles is clashing with Migaku's extension or vice-versa (again, I'm not blaming anyone).

As I see it. Both you and Migaku provide an extremely important service to my (and other's) learning. It would be extremely appreciated if you could consider working to support Migaku fully and in this case I hope this would serve as an incentive.

Thanks for your consideration. Please let me know.

P.S. Congrats on emigrating to Japan. My wife and I hope to be able to do the same thing within the next month. Just waiting for my HSP visa decision from the Japanese immigration services. Fingers crossed. If you would be open to sharing, I'd love to read more about your experience engineer-to-engineer. In any case thanks for also sharing your story so-far as it is highly relevant to us. Who knows, maybe in the future we could even get together for coffee. At least here's hoping. 😊

[825i]

All this said. I have been able to make some minor adjustments to get things working on my side (this does not invalidate my offer above).

The pitch colouring and dict lookups directly on the subtitle DO work if you click "Pop-out" player and open the player in a separate window. With the subtitles on the right-hand side in the original window. The downside though is that this is really cumbersome as the workflow becomes:

(This is the fastest workflow I could find myself for optimized learning)

Using a completely fresh Google Chrome with no other addons (except Migaku).

1. Open asbplayer from bookmark in bookmarks bar
2. Drag in video
3. Click folder icon at the top left and select subtitle
4. Click pop-out player at the bottom
5. Press F11 to maximise the window
6. -- When finished -- click the Asbplayer bookmark in bookmarks bar to reload the page and repeat steps 2 to 6.

Instead of just:

1. Drag in video
2. Click folder icon at the top left and select subtitle

With the pop-out player this also comes with the minor annoyance that Migaku's drop-down toolbar icon is persistently displayed on the screen:

Normally in the main window (not using pop-out mode). There is the banner and this is less of an annoyance.

Though it just makes for an annoying situation in full-screen because it won't go away.

Finally, I have also found that with experimenetal web services, the parsing of subtitles becomes EXTREMELEY slow. I guess that is just consequences of turning it on. I would only enable it anyway if unfortunately the wrong audio track is played by default.

[killergerbah]

@825i Thanks for your dedication and the really heartfelt message. I redirected you to Migaku mostly because lately I have been short on time and they would have a better chance of fixing the problem given that they have access to the code from both projects. As for the subscription - I think your argument is strong enough that I'd be incentivized to buy a subscription for myself and see if I can fix the issue. I can't make any promises on timeline though...
And good luck on your potential Japan move! I would definitely be open to coffee once you're here.

[825i]

Hi mate. This tool means a lot to my wife and I scarcely say that we would not maybe even be learning Japanese, least of all be in the process of moving to Japan, if it didn't exist. The effect it's had on our acquistion of Japanese has been massive, so we really both cannot thank you enough.

In this case, I'll meet you the rest of the way by sponsoring the project on Github. Please let me know though if it would be beneficial for you that I do it monthly instead through Ko-Fi, as I have no idea which one pays you out more for your work.

No problem with the timeline. Hopefully it is something easy enough to fix. I'll dig around a bit more and see if there is anything I can do to narrow down the issue.

At this stage I've been testing with Chrome v134.x and no other extension installed except
Migaku Early Access (v1.24.0-earlyaccess.2 - March 13).
I use a different browser for all my other stuff and keep Chrome purely for asbplayer.

P.S. Thanks for accepting the offer of coffee in person. No pressure though in the meantime and good luck with your work and own goals in Japan.

[825i]

I've noticed that when using the normal player (not pop-out) the relevant div which does not apply Migaku's formatting looks like this:

but when clicking to open the popout player it looks like this:

Which actually properly displays the subtitle formatting from Migaku and the pop-up dictionary. Rather than whatever style asbplayer has set.

[killergerbah]

@825i Thanks for the donation and for helping with debugging.. I guess the -mgk-branch is coming from Migaku's own modification of the DOM. However the asbplayer subtitle DOM is basically identical between the pop-out player and un-popped-out-player which has led me to speculate on some other possible explanations below.

I installed Migaku with a free subscription and was able to reproduce some of your findings. I'll summarize my experience below:

1. Subtitles are parsed in the popped-out player but not the popped-in player.
2. In-app subtitle list was almost always parsed.
3. asbplayer extension subtitles added to Chrome's built-in local webpage for video playback (drag-and-drop video file into Chrome) were not parsed.
4. Loading a video file into animebook and adding asbplayer-extension subtitles to that worked fine with Migaku.

One big difference between the popped-out vs popped-in asbplayer video player is that the popped-in player loads in an iframe. So I suspect that there may be a problem with Migaku's ability to interact with iframes, and indeed on inspecting their extension manifest, they do not seem to be loading any content scripts inside of iframes. However I believe this would significantly limit the kinds of pages that Migaku could parse, so it's possible I'm missing something.

Regardless, the only actionable items I could come up with were the following:

1. I can attempt a refactor so that the popped-out asbplayer video player does not load in an iframe. This would be a medium-heavy refactor.
2. For now asbplayer users will need to use alternative browser-based video players like animebook. They can add asbplayer extension subtitles to those if they want to use asbplayer features on top of a different video player. Migaku seems to work fine with animebook.
3. Confirm with Migaku about whether the extension really has issues with iframes and see if there's a way to work around or fix that.

So unfortunately no smoking gun but the iframe speculation is the best lead I could come up with after an hour of investigation.

[825i]

If Migaku doesn't support iframes would something as simple as updating it's manifest.json file solve this?

Such as:

manifest.json

{
  "content_scripts": [
    {
      "matches": ["https://killergerbah.github.io/asbplayer/"],
      "js": ["content-script.js"],
      "all_frames": true
    }
  ]
}

I tried using animebook and even an older and similar service (cannot remember what it was) which actually said not to use it but to use asbplayer. The dual problem with both is that whilst Migaku "does" work with animebook (and the older one, whose name I cannot remember). The formatting that Migaku applies is extremely slow. So whilst it does work, there is a lag to the formatting actually appearing. Furthermore, both are extremely slow to parse the subtitles in the right-hand bar. Maybe 20x slower than asbplayer.

Here's a .gif to explain what i mean. This is also despite the fact that the subtitles have been parsed already. So there's simply a lag from Migaku attaching to the subtitles.

With asbplayer and pop-out, it formats and instantly. In some cases Animebook et al. are all so slow that by the time the formatting and furigana etc. has been applied, the speaker has finished speaking and the subtitle disappears within 0.3 of a second.

Can you please explain how you got animebook to work with the formatting without any lag? I have a 13th Gen Intel i9-13980HX, 5.1Ghz, 24 Core, with 64GB of RAM and 2TB SSD. I run my machine always in performance mode. So I don't think it's my machine specs.

[825i]

Might as well share all my current findings. I can create separate issues for some of these but don't pressure or stress yourself too much please about fixing anything. 🙏

In any case I can use pop-out mode in the meantime. It would just be fantastic if it does work natively and I am a bit worried that the pop-out mode will cease to work later.

[killergerbah]

If Migaku doesn't support iframes would something as simple as updating it's manifest.json file solve this?

Possibly, but it's odd to me that Migaku doesn't already have a way to parse iframes, so it's possible I'm missing something. It's also possible that such a change may be necessary but not sufficient, depending on how Migaku is implemented. Ultimately they would know best. It may be possible to flip that flag on ourselves - I'll have to try that later.

Can you please explain how you got animebook to work with the formatting without any lag? I have a 13th Gen Intel i9-13980HX, 5.1Ghz, 24 Core, with 64GB of RAM and 2TB SSD. I run my machine always in performance mode. So I don't think it's my machine specs.

I don't believe it's possible. The reason asbplayer works without lag is because there's a cache of subtitle DOM elements that presumably Migaku is parsing all at once. I'm guessing the subtitle rendering for animebook does not use a cache, which would mean that Migaku needs to parse the subtitles as they appear in real time.