SubtitleCat Chinese Provider

A first-party IINA subtitle provider that scrapes subtitlecat.com for Simplified or Traditional Chinese subtitles and hands them directly to IINA’s subtitle workflow.

What it does

• Derives番号-style keywords (e.g. JERA-007) from the currently loaded video file and searches SubtitleCat automatically.
• Prompts for a manual keyword when guessing fails or when no Chinese download links are found.
• Parses search and detail pages to keep only entries that actually expose Simplified (zh-CN) or Traditional (zh-TW) downloads.
• Prioritises Simplified downloads and falls back to Traditional when necessary.
• Drops the downloaded subtitle into IINA’s sandbox (@tmp) so it can be saved beside the video afterwards.
• Provides a plugin preference to either return every match for manual selection or automatically pick the first search result.

Requirements

• IINA 1.4.0 or newer (for the plugin APIs used here).
• Network permission (network-request) and OSD permission (show-osd) are declared in Info.json and must remain enabled inside IINA’s plugin preferences.

Installing for development

1. Clone this repository locally.
2. Symlink the provider directory into IINA’s plugin sandbox with the .iinaplugin-dev suffix:

   ln -s "$(pwd)/SubtitleCatProvider" \
     "~/Library/Application Support/com.colliderli.iina/plugins/SubtitleCatProvider.iinaplugin-dev"

3. Restart IINA → Preferences → Plugins, enable SubtitleCat Chinese, and allow the requested permissions.
4. Play a video and choose Subtitles ▸ Find Online Subtitles ▸ SubtitleCat Chinese to trigger a search.

Usage notes

• The plugin logs to IINA’s plugin console with the [SubtitleCat] prefix. Keep the console open while developing or debugging.
• SubtitleCat rate-limits bursts of requests; wait a few seconds between searches if you hit HTTP errors.
• Downloads are saved to @tmp/<video>.<lang>.srt. When IINA prompts to save the subtitle, choose “Save As…” to copy it next to the media file.

HTTP behaviour

The provider now relies solely on IINA’s built-in http.get implementation. Requests are issued with basic desktop browser headers, and every call is wrapped with logging so failures are easy to diagnose from the plugin console.

Packaging for distribution

When you’re ready to share the plugin, run:

iina-plugin pack SubtitleCatProvider

The command produces SubtitleCatProvider.iinaplgz, which you can publish or hand to users for installation through IINA’s plugin manager.