How to get subtitle word under mouse via lua scripting?

[BLumia]

Hi,

I'm not a native English speaker and mostly will watch videos that come with subtitle if the video language is English. I was a PotPlayer user, which has a decent feature that allows user use the mouse to click on a word from the subtitle to preform a quick internet search of that word when the video is paused.

I'd like to have similar feature in mpv, then I looked into the lua scripting documentation. To implement such feature, I need to do the following steps:

1. handling mouse click (mp.add_key_binding("MOUSE_BTN0", "mouse-click", on_mouse_click))
2. get mouse position (mp.get_mouse_pos())
3. get the subtitle word under the curser position (???)
4. preform a search (os.execute("command to search"))

Sadly I didn't find any way to get the word under/at the mouse cursor. Did I missed something? Is there a way to implement such thing? Alternatively, is there any way to make the subtitle word selectable so I can manually copy the word to search them?

Some other links might related while I do the resource:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/mpv/comments/vhz16v/selectable_subtitle_or_text/
• Selectable subs iina/iina#4168

Thanks in advanced!

[guidocella]

There's no way to get the position of words in the subtitle. At best you can use a script like this to select a word in a menu. You need git master for mouse support.

local input = require 'mp.input'

mp.add_key_binding('F1', 'select-sub-word', function ()
    local words = {}
    for word in mp.get_property('sub-text', ''):gmatch('%g+') do
        words[#words + 1] = word
    end

    if #words == 0 then
        return
    end

    input.select({
        prompt = 'Select a word:',
        items = words,
        submit = function (i)
            mp.osd_message('Selected ' .. words[i])
            -- Do something with the word.
        end
    })
end)

[BLumia]

Thanks for the quick response! Your approach is also great!

By the way do you think if it's worth to submit a feature request to make "get word under the mouse" possible via scripting?

[guidocella]

Seems unfeasible, but it would be a request for https://github.com/libass/libass/issues

[BLumia]

Thanks! Here is the related discussion link: libass/libass#869