- Joined
- Jan 19, 2018
- Messages
- 2,647
Check it out: https://mangadex.org/drama
Partly out of interest in branching out from serving just manga, partly out @ixlone wanting to host a translation of one of the Onii-chan wa Oshimai! Drama CD tracks, we decided to try figuring out both if there's interest for audio drama subtitles (among viewers and translators alike) as well as how to structure and present this new service.
Since we don't still have clear expectations of what a so-called "DramaDex" should look like or even if there's an audience for it, we didn't want to commit to implementing a full working system yet. Instead, what we have right now is a simple prototype that showcases a single track with two translations: one in English, by the group Doki Fansubs (that you've hopefully heard of) and myself, and one in French translated from the aforementioned by @Shyning.
The new drama pages mimic the manga listing and title pages in their general style. There are no views (listens?) tracked, there's no editing or uploading or anything similar – for the moment, the data is all hardcoded so that I don't have to write a whole new chunk of database stuff for something we're not even sure people care about. Similarly, a whole bunch of metadata that we could be adding just isn't there yet. As some obvious examples, links to both internal (franchise relations) and external sources would likely be useful, as well as listing some people relevant to the product such as voice actors. Tags, too. All this wasn't strictly necessary, so I just left it out for now, although it makes the prototype drama page look a bit sparse by comparison to the manga title pages.
The player itself uses the browser's default HTML5 audio player, which depends on the browser. At first I wanted to build a consistent custom player, but decided against it because I didn't want the feedback for this prototype to be bogged down by various potential usability issues with the player itself. This doesn't mean we'll stick with it forever, but it's better to start off with a simplistic, functional version with few moving parts and improve on that based on the feedback.
Speaking of feedback, we're definitely going to need some, both for the design and the concept as a whole. As I alluded to, it'd be important to know if there are groups and translators that would be interested in uploading their own stuff, and I'm sure they're curious to know if there's an audience for it. Supply and demand are going to dictate how much focus we should be putting into this experiment.
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As a bonus update, I made some fairly significant changes to how the reader works internally. Visible improvements include the long-requested reloading of individual images and one or two other things. Please post your feedback (and bug reports) for that in the reader support thread. Also, if all went as planned, this update should hopefully fix some JavaScript-related issues on older browsers across the site, although probably not everything.
Partly out of interest in branching out from serving just manga, partly out @ixlone wanting to host a translation of one of the Onii-chan wa Oshimai! Drama CD tracks, we decided to try figuring out both if there's interest for audio drama subtitles (among viewers and translators alike) as well as how to structure and present this new service.
Since we don't still have clear expectations of what a so-called "DramaDex" should look like or even if there's an audience for it, we didn't want to commit to implementing a full working system yet. Instead, what we have right now is a simple prototype that showcases a single track with two translations: one in English, by the group Doki Fansubs (that you've hopefully heard of) and myself, and one in French translated from the aforementioned by @Shyning.
The new drama pages mimic the manga listing and title pages in their general style. There are no views (listens?) tracked, there's no editing or uploading or anything similar – for the moment, the data is all hardcoded so that I don't have to write a whole new chunk of database stuff for something we're not even sure people care about. Similarly, a whole bunch of metadata that we could be adding just isn't there yet. As some obvious examples, links to both internal (franchise relations) and external sources would likely be useful, as well as listing some people relevant to the product such as voice actors. Tags, too. All this wasn't strictly necessary, so I just left it out for now, although it makes the prototype drama page look a bit sparse by comparison to the manga title pages.
The player itself uses the browser's default HTML5 audio player, which depends on the browser. At first I wanted to build a consistent custom player, but decided against it because I didn't want the feedback for this prototype to be bogged down by various potential usability issues with the player itself. This doesn't mean we'll stick with it forever, but it's better to start off with a simplistic, functional version with few moving parts and improve on that based on the feedback.
Speaking of feedback, we're definitely going to need some, both for the design and the concept as a whole. As I alluded to, it'd be important to know if there are groups and translators that would be interested in uploading their own stuff, and I'm sure they're curious to know if there's an audience for it. Supply and demand are going to dictate how much focus we should be putting into this experiment.
---
As a bonus update, I made some fairly significant changes to how the reader works internally. Visible improvements include the long-requested reloading of individual images and one or two other things. Please post your feedback (and bug reports) for that in the reader support thread. Also, if all went as planned, this update should hopefully fix some JavaScript-related issues on older browsers across the site, although probably not everything.
