Recordings and frames on a card
1. A recording on an Anki card#
For Anki, the clip goes on the side you picked under its player on the card sheet (the language’s side, unless you pick the other). Saving the card copies it from the clip tray into the deck’s media/, beside the screenshots, named after the card — 20260921-142212-63ef-front-audio.mp3 or …-back-audio.mp3 — and the card records it as its front’s or its back’s recording. The clip stays in the tray, since the same clip may go onto an exercise card too.
The note types do not change. There is no audio field, and none was added: a note type’s shape must never change once notes have been studied with it (Note types and directions). The recording is written as [sound:…] into FrontImage or BackImage, after the picture when there is one, because those two fields already sit on the right side of every template — your own restyled templates too. Anki plays a [sound:] wherever a card shows one, when that side is shown (unless the deck’s options in Anki tell it not to play sounds by themselves), and with its replay button any time.
FrontImage: <img src="20260921-142212-63ef-front.jpg">[sound:20260921-142212-63ef-front-audio.mp3]preview card plays the recording from the tray before the card is even saved.
The package carries the recordings as it carries the screenshots, and the round trip keeps them: the sync reads [sound:] back out of the two fields, copies the files home, and follows what you did in Anki — a [sound:] you deleted from a field there is gone from the card here after the next sync, and a sound you replaced under its old name is copied home anew. A deck brought in from an Anki export for the first time brings its sounds the same way.
2. A recording on an exercise card#
For an exercise deck and for markdown the recording is named in the card itself, front-audio: audio/clock-710aea.mp3 or back-audio: — or, on a jolly card, as a line in a box, . The deck copies the file in from the tray when it takes the card; a studio document does when the card is pasted into it (The clip tray). On the deck’s study page the card plays its front’s recording when it is shown and its back’s when it is turned, as Anki does.
3. A frame of the video#
In the video player the card sheet has a frame row with 📷 capture the current frame. It puts the video’s own frame at the card’s moment on the card — not a screenshot of the page, but the picture of the video alone, cropped exactly to it.
Under it, once a frame is taken, the picture, two choices of side — on the Persian side or on the English side (the language’s and the gloss language’s names), the second picked unless you pick the first — and remove. On a jolly card the frame goes into a box instead, as a line , like a recording (Jolly cards).
How it is taken, and it depends on which kind of video it is.
A film on this machine is a <video> element of this very page, served from the same address as the page, so the picture is read straight off the film onto a canvas: no sharing question, nothing to allow, no browser window to keep in view — and it works on a phone exactly as on the computer.
A YouTube video is a frame the page may not read into a picture (the browser forbids it: the frame belongs to another site), so the capture asks the browser to share what is on the screen, once. No phone browser shares a tab, so a YouTube video’s frame is a computer’s affair:
- Chrome and Edge
- ask to share this tab, with its sound, so that the same share also serves a YouTube video’s recording (Recording a YouTube video’s sound): one Allow serves both. The capture is then cropped to the video element itself.
- Firefox
- shares a window or the screen: share this browser window (or the screen) and keep the player in view. Two coloured dots flash on the video’s corners for an instant while the capture finds the exact area of the video in what was shared.
The sheet hides itself while it takes the picture from a share, so as not to be in its own frame. A paused video shows YouTube’s controls over it, and they linger for five seconds once it plays, so a paused video is rolled in, muted, from about five seconds before the card’s moment — the controls have faded when the wanted frame goes by — and then frozen back on that moment, its sound as it was.
A note under the button, shown the first time and whenever a capture fails, says the same in short. Sharing stays on while the page is open, so later captures are instant. The capture needs a secure page: the toolbox’s https:// address is one, wherever you open it from — a phone or a laptop on your network as well as the machine itself — and so is localhost on the machine itself. A secure page is enough for a film’s frame anywhere; it is not enough for a YouTube video’s on a phone, which wants a browser that shares a tab, and no phone’s does.
| It says | What to do |
|---|---|
| capture failed — capture needs a secure page — open the toolbox over its https address | the page was opened over plain http://: use the toolbox’s https:// address |
| a YouTube video’s frame is taken from a share of this tab, and this browser shares no tab — no phone browser does. Capture this video’s frame on the computer | you are on a phone, on a YouTube video. A film on this machine has its frame taken anywhere, this phone included; a YouTube video’s has to be taken on the computer |
| capture failed — scroll the video into view first | the video is scrolled out of the window |
| capture failed — could not see the player in the shared window — keep this window visible on top, then try again | the shared window or screen (Firefox always shares one) did not show the corner dots: the browser window was covered, minimised or elsewhere. monitor in place of window means a whole screen was shared |
| capture failed — calibration failed — try again | the corner dots were found, but not where they should be: keep the player unzoomed and in view, and try again |
| capture failed — the video area fell outside the capture — retry | the shared window or screen does not show the whole video |
| capture failed — no frame arrived — try once more | the share sent no picture in time |
Where the frame goes. On an Anki card it is saved with the card, as a JPEG in the deck’s media/ (…-back.jpg), and shown on its side; it can be at most 8 MB. For an exercise deck or markdown it is kept in the clip tray and named on the card as its front-image or back-image, images/clock-frame-3fa9c2.jpg, and the deck or the document copies it in from there.