Hi! I was super excited to set up Migaku and was ready to purchase a subscription. I just wanted to try it out first on the free version to see how it worked. I've stumbled into many problems which I will detail here, and I hope the awesome Migaku team could use it as constructive feedback.
The first time I was trying to set it up, it was a bit unintuitive the process of making a new card, but nothing too bad. It's just difficult to find the video that walks through the main features of the Browser Extension and shows how to create cards. There are some blog posts, a few videos here and there, but this should be much more obvious for a new user and much easier to get things rolling, in my opinion. Some silly things I couldn't figure out: I thought if I clicked on a word, a popup would come up with the definition, with an option to manually change if I don't know, have seen, or learnt a word (I think I had seen this in another video, but I couldn't get it to work). I didn't see a place where this basic thing was explained but I shrugged it off after I was able to export a sentence to Anki.
The next step was the most discouraging one. It seems it's very hard to stream Japanese media with both English and Japanese subtitles so that it would be compatible with the Migaku process of sentence mining. I tried VPNs and Netflix, but I couldn't get Japanese media. Then I tried to download a media file with subtitles, with the hope of being able to use it on the Migaku Player on the browser. It appeared not to be compatible with the browser. I tried the first conversion option (keep HEVC) facilitated by the Migaku conversion software, and it still didn't work. I have the HEVC codecs downloaded. Then I tried the second conversion option (h264) and it's taking forever to convert. I'm very aware that the issues that I listed in this paragraph have little to do with Migaku, and you guys are already trying your best to mitigate this friction with your Migaku converter, but I think this is way too complex and slow. I think that the best option for downloaded files is with a local program, and I was pleased to see that there was the Migaku MPV. However, it is very unclear whether this project has been abandoned or not. The github still seems to be receiving pushes but on other places it says it's no longer supported. In any case, I tried to get it running and it wasn't obvious how to get it to work, and I'm still fiddling with it.
In summary, I think Migaku has an enormous potential, but I think the process needs to be clear, simplified and streamlined. I've tried all this because I'm stubborn as heck and have been trying to get this work for 6 hours. But an average user will give up after 10 minutes if it isn't clearer all the process of sentence mining. Thank you for your work guys!