Video and subtitles on macOS

Translate the line on screen,
burned in subtitles included.

Pause, press ⌥A, drag a box around the subtitle. macOS reads it off the picture and the translation comes back next to it. Drag over the one word you did not know and it gets explained in that sense, saved with the line it came from. Any player, no extension, because nothing here depends on a subtitle track.

01 · The problem

Subtitles are pictures, not text

Whatever is painted over the video is drawn, not written. There is nothing to double-click and nothing to copy, so the usual reflex fails before it starts.

Meanwhile the line has moved on. You rewind five seconds, pause at roughly the right frame, squint, and retype the word into a dictionary tab. Then you have to find your place in the scene again.

Nobody does that twice in one episode. You let the word go, tell yourself it was probably not important, and it comes back three episodes later still unknown.

02 · Why the usual tools do not help

Browser extensions stop at the browser

The popular subtitle add-ons work by reading the subtitle track out of a specific streaming site inside a specific browser. Useful, until you are watching a downloaded file in IINA, or a Blu-ray rip in VLC, or a lecture in QuickTime, or anything on a service the extension has not been taught.

Burned-in subtitles beat all of them, since there is no track to read in the first place.

03 · How to do it

Pause, box the line, carry on

Leafy reads whatever is on screen, so the player does not matter.

Hit space to pause. Press ⌥A and box the subtitle. macOS text recognition reads that patch of the frame and the translation appears beside the original. Drag over the word you did not know and you get it explained in the sense this scene is using, saved together with the line. Hit space again.

The whole thing costs about two seconds, which is the difference between looking a word up and deciding it was probably not important.

IINA, VLC, QuickTime, Plex, Netflix or YouTube in any browser, a video call, a downloaded lecture, a screen share. It never asks what the source was.

04 · What you get later

The line comes with the word

A word from a subtitle without its line is close to useless, because half of what you were learning was who said it and about what. Leafy keeps the sentence, so when the word turns up again you get the sense that was actually in play.

Everything ends up in one searchable library on your Mac, exportable to Anki, CSV, Excel, JSON or PDF whenever you want it somewhere else.

05 · The honest part

Where your words go

Your library lives on your Mac. No account, no sync server, no ads. The screenshot is read on your machine and never leaves it.

The text you scan does go out to an AI so it can explain the word as your sentence uses it, with nothing attached that says who you are. The privacy page spells out exactly what is sent and what is kept.