(Notice 2023) Use asbplayer instead
Animebook is unmaintained, but asbplayer has basically every feature animebook has, with a much higher focus on ease-of-use and a lot of cool extra features. Please use it instead.
Animebook
An HTML5 video player with navigable subtitles. Since subtitles are in the browser, you can quickly look up words with popup dictionaries like yomichan, and you can quickly create flashcards for Anki using the Animebook Chrome extension.
Animebook is designed to match the mining workflow described in https://www.animecards.site, with features such as:
- Ability to retime subtitles directly in the web player. Useful for the majority of subtitles on https://kitsunekko.net/ and https://itazuraneko.neocities.org/library/sub.html, which almost always need to be retimed to the video you're watching.
- Fast flashcard creation using the Animebook Chrome extension. If you use Yomichan to add a word to Anki while watching a show, you can then use Animebook to add screenshots, audio, and subtitle lines automatically to your flashcard.
- App is a single html page, making it easier to download and save locally. If you want this, download here by right clicking and hitting 'Save As...'.
- Optional auto pause for when a caption is done playing, giving you time to scan any words or phrases you didn't catch.
Usage
Drag and drop your video file and your subtitle file (vtt, srt, or ass) onto the webpage and you should be good to go. You can also right click on the video and disable "Show controls" if you find the browser's built-in controls distracting. I typically do this and rely on the sidebar and hotkeys for navigation.
| Command | Description |
|---|---|
| Left/Right | Move backward/forward |
| Up/Down | Move backward/forward |
| Space | Pause/Play |
| Enter | Replay caption |
| a | Toggle auto pause mode |
| \ | Skip next auto pause. Only applies in auto pause mode. |
| v | Toggle subtitle visibility on/off |
| c | Copy current subtitle text to clipboard |
| s | Copy screenshot of video to clipboard |
| , | Move video to the middle of the previous caption and take a screenshot. Hold 'Shift' to move only. |
| . | Move video to the middle of the next caption and take a screenshot. Hold 'Shift' to move only. |
| b (or double click sidebar edge) | Collapse/expand sidebar |
| h | Hide content in parentheses (configurable in the 'Appearance' tab) |
| ? | Open help menu |
| t | Cycle through available audio tracks. Currently (as of July 2020), this only works in Chrome and other chromium-based browsers if enable-experimental-web-platform-features is enabled in chrome://flags. On Firefox, media.track.enabled must be set to true in about:config. |
| -/= | Decrease/Increase subtitle font size |
| Page Up/Page Down | OP Skip. Move backward/forward 87 seconds. |
| m/n | Increase/Decrease playback speed. |
| F11 | Full screen toggle. This is a browser shortcut. |
| Shift D | Download retimed subs as an srt file |
| e | Add context to most recent anki card (requires the Animebook Chrome extension to be installed) |
Video format support (last update January 2023)
If you find your video can't play, or that your video will play but there's no audio, it's almost always because your browser can't play the file's video or audio codec. This is the case with HEVC/H.265 video and AC3 audio, which browsers still have trouble supporting due to licensing issues. Current state of browser support:
| Browser | Support |
|---|---|
| Marmaduke all-codecs+ builds of Chromium (Windows) | Will play almost any file |
| Chrome and other Chromium based browsers (Windows/Mac) | Will play almost any file that doesn't use AC3 audio |
| Microsoft Edge | Uses Chromium and technically supports AC3 audio, but I had visual jittering issues when I tried it with HEVC video; this may be because I didn't buy HEVC Video Extensions from the Microsoft Store* |
| Chromium based browsers (Linux) | Support for HEVC video is spotty at the moment, but some browsers like Thorium support it. AC3 audio is not supported |
| Firefox | Will play few video codecs |
| Everything else | Probably not a good option |
So, if you want animebook to play basically everything, the Marmaduke all-codecs+ builds of chromium are your best bet, and you can install Yomichan on it (instructions below). However, these builds are only made for Windows, and I'm unaware of a way to get a Chromium build for OSX or Linux with both the HEVC and AC3 flags enabled (other than by compiling Chromium yourself). So for lack of a good option at the moment, I'll deflect to suggesting Thorium if you're not on Windows, which does support HEVC video. Just not AC3 audio, which is relatively rare for anime releases anyway.
Marmaduke Chromium installation instructions:
- Find and install a Marmaduke all-codecs+ build of Chromium on https://chromium.woolyss.com/. Make sure both the tags "Marmaduke" and "all-codecs+" (with the PLUS sign) are tagged on the release.
- Enable the Chrome web store, by manually installing https://github.com/NeverDecaf/chromium-web-store into Chromium (this is required because the Chromium build is ungoogled).
*I used to recommend Microsoft Edge with HEVC Video Extensions to watch HEVC video on animebook, but as of October 2020 the Microsoft store started charging money for HEVC support, so I removed it from the browser list. It technically does support AC3 audio though, unlike Ungoogled Chromium.
I want to use asbplayer now, but is there anything missing from it that animebook has?
The only things I couldn't get asbplayer to do that I have done with animebook are:
- Record a flashcard without having to replay audio. This is probably not possible due to technical differences between the two projects, since animebook literally ships an entire Wasm binary of FFmpeg in its Chrome extension, while asbplayer uses browser apis to record audio. The asbplayer approach has its benefits (most notably not needing an extension to record flashcards), so unless you need to machine gun record flashcards without the audio clip playback driving you up the wall, this tradeoff probably benefits you.
- Automatically select the flashcard you just created in the Anki browser. This could mean more clicks to edit/verify a flashcard you're mining, but it's most likely not a big deal.
Similar Software
- https://github.com/killergerbah/asbplayer - Web based player like animebook but with a ton of neat features and regular updates
- https://github.com/ripose-jp/Memento - Desktop video player with Japanese support, based on mpv
- Anacreon's mpv script - Lets you mine using mpv and a texthooker
- https://github.com/katspaugh/videobook - Not currently maintained, but the original idea for animebook comes from this web player