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Show HN: I made an extension to watch Netflix films with screenplays in sync

screenplaysubs.com

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Re: Show HN: I made an extension to watch Netflix films with screenplays in sync

#21
post #8

Oh, someone has to manually time the movie. They only support about six movies. I expected that it would use closed captioning data, do the sync automatically, and support far more titles.

The syncing is done automatically, at least mostly. TL;DR: ScreenplaySubs fetches the subtitles from Netflix, parses the PDF-formatted screenplays into JSON, and syncs by calculating the sentence similarities between subtitle and screenplay dialogue. In particular, we use the Universal Sentence Encoder for deciding whether a subtitle matches with a screenplay dialogue. If a screenplay dialogue is similar enough with…

I'd definitely be interested to read more about the tech. I wonder if it can be used to time-sync audiobooks to their ebooks counterparts.

This is my use-case:

Kindle has a feature called "Audible Narration." You buy a Kindle book, and the Audible audio book, which allows you to play the audio book while it highlights the words on the Kindle book as you're listening. This effortless switching between audio and text enables some interesting reading behavior. Certain books become easier to read. Note taking also gets much easier (Highlighting text is much easier than bookmarking timestamps on an audio book).

The problem is, getting your annotations and highlights and other data out of Kindle is very difficult, because Kindle does not have a public API. Same with Audible.

So I'm thinking of emulating Audible narration with a hybrid ebook/audiobook reader app. The ebook would be a simple HTML page (converted from epub, formatting be damned) and a simple audio player. As the audio plays, the HTML page would scroll and words would be highlighted.

Challenge is to timestamp tag the HTML with the audio track. I'd guess I could TTS the audio track and then somehow diff the generated text with the epub content. Given that some audiobooks are abridged, some read the footnotes on each mention, and some explain the visuals, I would assume diffing would not be very straightforward.

Do you know of any solutions I could look into?

Re: Show HN: I made an extension to watch Netflix films with screenplays in sync

#22

This is great! Also check out LanguageLearningWithNetflix [0] which lets you watch videos with two subs in different languages, displays the subs as HTML so select/copy/define will work (and it has a built-in dictionary too). It also allows you to quickly jump to the beginning of each sentence so you can hear it multiple times, which helps improve your listening skills. For me, it has been a fun way to improve my Ger…

App Store is not really the best environment for niche apps, I suppose. What about Android? I'd presume F-Droid could host something like this even if the Play Market doesn't?

Re: Show HN: I made an extension to watch Netflix films with screenplays in sync

#23
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like the Amazon Prime Video "X ray" feature that shows the actors, bios, etc, in the current scene. It's odd to me that other services like Netflix don't have something similar.

Most likely other services don't do this because of patents.

and they don't own IMDB where much of this information is already organized into a usable state.

Re: Show HN: I made an extension to watch Netflix films with screenplays in sync

#24
It would be interesting to have a TTS synth output the screenplay on another card, one which could be used by a blind person to plug some headphones in (not covering all the sound, in order to hear the environment and speeches). Maybe even optionally disable the spoken words, and only output the scene description, and emit a beep on a cut.

The demo on the page looks great, and this is stuff which should be automatable at some point by AI.

Re: Show HN: I made an extension to watch Netflix films with screenplays in sync

#25
post #8

Oh, someone has to manually time the movie. They only support about six movies. I expected that it would use closed captioning data, do the sync automatically, and support far more titles.

The syncing is done automatically, at least mostly. TL;DR: ScreenplaySubs fetches the subtitles from Netflix, parses the PDF-formatted screenplays into JSON, and syncs by calculating the sentence similarities between subtitle and screenplay dialogue. In particular, we use the Universal Sentence Encoder for deciding whether a subtitle matches with a screenplay dialogue. If a screenplay dialogue is similar enough with…

Interesting work. Glad you've been able to chart a path through some tedious problems.

Over the last several years I've imagined a lot of projects (both serious utilities, and the absurd/artistic) in roughly the territory you're exploring...

- For my MFA thesis (2012) I used plaintext (thankfully, though they had plenty of their own problems) transcripts of a TV show as a corpus for generating poems from, and at the time I thought it would be an interesting follow-up project to turn them back into video clips.

- Mapping film quotes/citations back to the script/film and accuracy-checking movie quotes. (can imagine both of these being useful for film forums like the movies/sci-fi stack-exchange sites).

- Generating script-cuts of movies that re-order/drop scenes and just show the printed script on-screen where scenes were cut.

- A film-analysis/screenwriting-class sort of interface oriented around reading a segment and then playing it (could be particularly interesting when there happen to be multiple known script drafts?)

- Re-constructing a character monologue from lines spoken by an actor that turned down the role.

- Generating a super-cut of actor X saying Y.

- Generating focused cuts of a film that cover, say, every scene a given character does/doesn't appear in, or every scene that mentions X.

Re: Show HN: I made an extension to watch Netflix films with screenplays in sync

#26
post #18

Where do you get the screenplays, out of curiosity?

I wondered this, too. Also--which draft, if there's more than one? Is it like, "latest available", or "easiest to parse", or do you have a policy like only shooting scripts?

Re: Show HN: I made an extension to watch Netflix films with screenplays in sync

#27

Very interesting! Fun tidbit: for TV actors, regularly reading pilot scripts and then watching the produced pilot for comparison is a huge common educational technique. You get to imagine what kind of acting and directorial choices you'd make, and then see what was actually done. Often times you'll realize you had totally misinterpreted what a scene was even about. It's also fun to see how every script is filled with…

Fascinating! It can also be the other way around, where an actor miraculously interpreted an unactable script well. E.g. Joaquin Phoenix delivered "It vexes me. I am vexed." in Gladiator quite well.

Nitpick, but I think it was "It vexes me. I'm terribly vexed." Otherwise agree with you though. It's not something you imagine someone saying in the course of normal, or even quite abnormal, conversation, but Joaquin Phoenix pulled it off in spades - sounded totally natural, and entirely fit with the character of Commodus.

Re: Show HN: I made an extension to watch Netflix films with screenplays in sync

#28
post #16

This is great! Also check out LanguageLearningWithNetflix [0] which lets you watch videos with two subs in different languages, displays the subs as HTML so select/copy/define will work (and it has a built-in dictionary too). It also allows you to quickly jump to the beginning of each sentence so you can hear it multiple times, which helps improve your listening skills. For me, it has been a fun way to improve my Ger…

LLN is good but seems to favor anti-features like disabling text selection on subtitles (except in the side pane) in order to push their in-house paid-for features. Regarding your comment about extensibility, this applies to mostly every software platform other than the web, unfortunately. And even there, it feels like a happy accident. There's much work to be done in this area.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: I made an extension to watch Netflix films with screenplays in sync

#29
post #5

I don't use netflix and prefer subtitles, but it looks nice! Maybe you could implement smooth scroll and some sort of an overlay mode.

Thank you, and that's a great idea I've considered for future releases. More specifically, the layout presented in this video looks ideal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HybzbDBF7HQ . Where the screenplay can replace the letterbox at the bottom. One of the reasons we decided not to implement that for now is to provide a bigger room for error since our algorithm is still not perfect. Sometimes the extension choose to…

makes sense :)

yea I like this example better, but thought of an actual overlay.

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