Description

Open source, cross-platform video player with language learning features.

• Based on VLC player, offers dictionary lookup for subtitles and word saving features
• Works with any language pair

To download Windows release go here: http://oaprograms.github.io/lingo-player

How it works:

Let's say you are learning Spanish:

• Open a Spanish movie, with Spanish subtitles, and optionally 2nd subtitles in your language.
• Hover over any word to see translations to your language, click on it hear it and to save it to dictionary.
• You can mark words with 4 levels of familiarity (New - red, Recognized - orange, Familiar - yellow and Known - green)
• You can look up list of saved words any time and read subtitles in subtitle listing mode.

Used Technologies

• NW.js (http://nwjs.io/)
• AngularJS (https://angularjs.org/)
• WebChimera.js (http://www.webchimera.org/)
• VLC player (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html)
• NeDB (https://github.com/louischatriot/nedb)
• Google Translate (https://translate.google.com/)

Running locally (Windows)

Requirements: Node.js and PowerShell (built into Windows).

.\setup.ps1   # one-time: installs deps + NW.js 0.12.3 runtime + WebChimera/VLC
.\run.ps1     # launches the app

setup.ps1 is idempotent — re-run it any time. Everything it downloads (the .nwjs runtime, node_modules) is git-ignored and self-contained in the repo, so there are no machine-specific paths to configure.

Building a portable release (Windows)

After setup.ps1, build a self-contained, no-install folder + zip:

.\build-portable.ps1

Output goes to .\dist\ (git-ignored):

• dist\Lingo Player\ — run LingoPlayer.exe from anywhere, on a clean Win10/11 with nothing installed (bundles Chromium, VLC, and the VC++ 2013 runtime).
• dist\Lingo Player Portable.zip — the distributable.

The launcher is renamed nw.exe → LingoPlayer.exe by patching the WebChimera native module's hard-coded host name (tools/patch-nw-name.js) — a plain rename would break native-module loading. The folder is the deliverable: NW.js native modules require the host to keep a fixed name, so this can't be a single bare .exe.

Planned features in future:

• Make OSX version
• Add more dictionary sources
• Lemmatization / stemming?
• Highlight frequent words?
• Translate app UI into several languages

Screenshots

Licence

MIT