SubMiner

Turn mpv into a sentence-mining workstation.

Look up words with Yomitan, export to Anki in one key, track your immersion — all without leaving mpv.

How It Works

SubMiner runs as an invisible Electron overlay on top of mpv. Subtitles render as an interactive layer. Move your cursor over any word and trigger a Yomitan lookup. Press one key to snapshot the sentence, audio, and screenshot into Anki via AnkiConnect.

Features

Dictionary Lookups

Yomitan runs inside the overlay. Trigger a lookup on any word for full dictionary popups — definitions, pitch accent, frequency data — without ever leaving mpv.

Instant Anki Mining

Create an Anki card with the sentence, audio clip, screenshot, and machine translation from the exact playback moment with one key press, click, or controller input.

Reading Annotations

Real-time subtitle annotations with frequency highlighting, JLPT tags, N+1 targeting, and a character name dictionary. Known words fade back; new words stand out. Grammar-only tokens render as plain text so you focus on what matters.

Immersion Dashboard

Local stats dashboard — watch time, anime library, vocabulary growth, mining throughput, session history, and trends. All stored locally, no third-party tracking.

Integrations

AniList	Automatic episode tracking and progress sync
Jellyfin	Browse and launch media from your Jellyfin server
Jimaku	Search and download Japanese subtitles
alass / ffsubsync	Automatic subtitle retiming
WebSocket	Annotated subtitle feed for external clients (texthooker pages, custom tools)

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Requirements

	Required	Optional
Player	mpv with IPC socket	—
Processing	ffmpeg, mecab + mecab-ipadic	guessit (AniSkip)
Media	—	yt-dlp, chafa, ffmpegthumbnailer
Selection	—	fzf / rofi

Note

bun is required if building from source or using the CLI wrapper: subminer. Pre-built releases (AppImage, DMG, installer) do not require it.

Platform-specific:

Linux	macOS	Windows
hyprctl or xdotool + xwininfo	Accessibility permission	No extra deps

Arch Linux

paru -S --needed mpv ffmpeg mecab-git mecab-ipadic
# Optional
paru -S --needed yt-dlp fzf rofi chafa ffmpegthumbnailer xdotool xorg-xwininfo
# X11 / XWAYLAND
paru -S --needed xdotool xorg-xwininfo

macOS

brew install mpv ffmpeg mecab mecab-ipadic
# Optional
brew install yt-dlp fzf rofi chafa ffmpegthumbnailer

Grant Accessibility permission to SubMiner in System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility.

Windows

Install mpv and ffmpeg and ensure both are on your PATH.

For MeCab, install MeCab for Windows with the UTF-8 dictionary.

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Quick Start

1. Install

Arch Linux (AUR)

paru -S subminer-bin

Or manually:

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/subminer-bin.git && cd subminer-bin && makepkg -si

Linux (AppImage)

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
wget https://github.com/ksyasuda/SubMiner/releases/latest/download/SubMiner.AppImage -O ~/.local/bin/SubMiner.AppImage \
	&& chmod +x ~/.local/bin/SubMiner.AppImage
wget https://github.com/ksyasuda/SubMiner/releases/latest/download/subminer -O ~/.local/bin/subminer \
	&& chmod +x ~/.local/bin/subminer

Note

The subminer wrapper uses a Bun shebang. Make sure bun is on your PATH.

macOS

Download the latest DMG or ZIP from GitHub Releases and drag SubMiner.app into /Applications.

Windows

Download the latest installer or portable .zip from GitHub Releases. Make sure mpv is on your PATH.

From source

See the build-from-source guide.

2. First Launch

Run the app. On first launch SubMiner starts in the system tray, creates a default config, and opens a setup popup to install the mpv plugin and configure Yomitan dictionaries.

3. Mine

subminer video.mkv          # play video with overlay
subminer --start video.mkv  # explicit overlay start
subminer stats              # open immersion dashboard
subminer stats -b           # stats daemon in background

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Documentation

Full guides on configuration, Anki setup, Jellyfin, immersion tracking, and more: docs.subminer.moe

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Acknowledgments

SubMiner builds on the work of these open-source projects:

Project	Role
Anacreon-Script	Inspiration for the mining workflow
asbplayer	Inspiration for subtitle sidebar and logic for YouTube subtitle parsing
Bee's Character Dictionary	Character name recognition in subtitles
GameSentenceMiner	Inspiration for Electron overlay with Yomitan integration
jellyfin-mpv-shim	Jellyfin integration
Jimaku.cc	Japanese subtitle search and downloads
Renji's Texthooker Page	Base for the WebSocket texthooker integration
Yomitan	Dictionary engine powering all lookups and the morphological parser
yomitan-jlpt-vocab	JLPT level tags for vocabulary

License

GNU General Public License v3.0