Do you know what Stremio is?
Stremio is an open source streaming platform, which has been my go to for a while now. Here's a super thorough guide about what Stremio is and how to set it up. It's very easy to use and makes it possible to access almost everything I want to watch thanks to the modularity on which it is built.
What do I mean by modularity? Everything works based on a protocol defined by the platform, which requests resources to the addons the user has installed. For example, you may have an addon that has a list for the trending page on Netflix, if you click on a series, another addon may get the metadata (title, release date, cast...) from IMDB, another addon may get you some links where you can watch it, and when you click on an episode another addon may gather subtitles from OpenSubtitles. The thing is you don't have to think about any of this. All you need to do is "install" (that's the word they use, but you don't have to download anything, they get saved on your account) the addons you want once and all of that will be done in the background, and displayed to you in a user friendly way like in any other streaming service. Also, the stock official addons make it very much usable except for providing the content itself, so you'll have to look out for stream addons (which give access to the streams/videos themselves). You can find info about these on the Stremio Addons subreddit or use a list of community addons (I personally followed this guide, but it is written in spanish). Now you know it and maybe I made you discover your new favorite platform, but...
Why did I make an addon?
As you may have seen, there's A BUNCH of addons, for many different purposes. And I just use the stock addons (Cinemeta, OpenSubtitles v3...), a stream provider one and the fantastic MAL-Stremio Addon anyways. So why make one?
A dear friend of mine studies Japanese by himself. A lot of the time, Animelon had subtitles which timing was offset from the video, which made it tedious or impossible to use, so I recommended the platform to him, because it has a subtitle timing offset feature built right in. That's where the problem arose: the base subtitle addons didn't usually return results in Japanese, and the one community addon that claimed it would didn't work either.
I don't know Japanese at all, but I didn't let that stop me. So, with a failed addon project on my past, I cloned that repo to get a "template" and started researching the protocol (again), japanese subtitle providers, and started making changes. I had a working prototype within 3 days, which was a surprise even for myself! I just had to wait for the Stremio team to help me with a bug on the tool they provide to publish addons. I opened issues, wrote emails, and waited while making improvements on the addon... But I finally was tired of waiting and published it on Render. The project has changed a lot since then, adding more subtitle sources and changing the flow of the program so it is faster and more accurate. There's still progress to be made, because this is one of my first experiences using Node.js, Express.js, and doing backend, so the code is not the cleanest, for example. The current list of issues and future enhancements will always be updated on the GitHub repository, so feel free to check it out and/or contribute to it there!