I'm affected by a mild form of phonemic deafness: the part of my brain in charge of translating sound into words doesn't work perfectly. Therefore, understanding spoken language is more difficult for me than for the average human, even in my mother tongue (Italian). Nevertheless, I've been always fascinated by languages, and I have learned to read in a few of them.
With the advent of the DVD, movies and TV series in their original language have become available and I'm using them as a mean to improve my comprehension. Usually, I try to understand the dialogues without using subtitles, but sometimes I need to look at them (if possible, in the language of the audio track) for a while. Apple's DVD Player allows me to do so, but you need to issue a series of commands using the controller or the menus to turn them on. However, it is possible to automate this process, causing the video to scrub backwards a little, activate the chosen subtitles and start the playback again.
As a first step, you must create a new service in Automator with a single action: "Run Applescript" (located in "Utilities"). Input the following script:
tell application "DVD Player" rewind dvd delay 1 -- approximate rewind time in seconds pause dvd set subtitle to 1 -- to choose first item of available subtitles play dvd end tellSelect the options "Service receives no input" and "in any application". The number after "delay" controls the amount of back-scrubbing; you may try different values to fit your taste, and "set subtitle to 1" enables the first set of available subtitles.
tell application "DVD Player" set subtitle to 0 end tellThis will allow you to switch subtitles off.
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