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Hieroglyph, a research tool to easily view a YouTube video's transcript
- c54 6y agoThis is great! Do the transcripts come with timing information? Would love to be able to ctrl+f text and then jump to that part of the video.
- herbertl 6y agoI'd love that too! It doesn't right now, I just import it into Otter.ai if I decide that video has something I want to quote and link to or excerpt from. Nonetheless, it's still a great tool to help me preview or "skim" through a video.
- Firerouge 6y agoCool idea, I just tried it and it doesn't look like it would work for that though. It spits out a wall of text, without any special formatting or speaker metadata, though it does seem to make an exception for distinguishing music sections.
- krrrh 6y agoIt could get costly because their transcription pricing is geared towards video editing, but you can scrape the video and load it into Descript and have this power. https://www.descript.com/ https://www.descript.com/
- fudged71 6y agoYou could consider extracting the YouTube audio and using an aligner algorithm with the transcript to get precise timing without paying anything
- sali0 6y agoHey, I will look into adding these. Thanks for the suggestion.
- ravedave5 6y agoThis is really interesting, this may be useful for long videos im unsure if I want to watch. I can probably "read a video" in 1/4th the time to watch it.
- sundarurfriend 6y agoThis is really nice. The transcripts are better than I expected, from the few videos I tested with. I usually try to avoid videos for information, so this maybe my new way to avoid them while still getting the info from it.
- nonbirithm 6y agoI was wanting exactly this a just a few days ago. I wish it were a YouTube or youtube-dl feature.
- comex 6y agoyoutube-dl can download the auto-transcription as a subtitle file with --write-auto-sub, and there are various tools that can turn that into plain text.
- sali0 6y agoI did not know this. Thanks for the tip!
- pimlottc 6y agoyoutube-dl has options to save subs, though I think you’d have to post-progress them to get them without time stamps. https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/README.md#subtitle-options https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/README.md...
- gruez 6y agoI don't get it. What's the advantage of this compared to the "view transcript" functionality on the video page itself? It might be confined to a small window, but at least it has timestamps and isn't one long wall of text.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jcims 6y agoI was actually looking for something like this to do some topic discovery and association on podcasts (most of which also had a YouTube channel).
- TeMPOraL 6y agoTIL: there's an "open transcript" functionality on YouTube. It's very well hidden. I wouldn't have found it if your comment didn't prompt me to look for it.
- mehrdadn 6y agoSome videos remove that option. (Haven't tried to see how Hierglyph handles that situation though.)
- kebman 6y agoFor one, YouTube gives you time codes, which are good when translating, but just in the way when reading or editing (say to find a quote). Second, while a minor annoyance, the text is hard scroll and read, due to how constricted the reading area is. Hieroglyph gives you a huge blob, which isn't super-fantastic either, but IMHO it's slightly better than YouTube's "view transcript" functionality, if nothing else, than for reasons of presentation.
- sali0 6y agoThis is exactly it! We wanted to make it readable. I know its not great and its something I want to improve. I'm taking notes from all of the suggestions in this thread.
- Sommer 6y agoYou can also get a YouTube video transcript directly from the API with one call, just register for a free developer key and use: https://youtube.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/captions?part=snippet&videoId=[Video_ID]&key=[YOUR_API_KEY] https://youtube.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/captions?part=snip... official docs: https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/captions https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/captions
- undershirt 6y agoyoutube-dl --write-sub --skip-download
- stef25 6y agoDoesn't work unless there are subtitles (WARNING: video doesn't have subtitles), which seems to be different from captions.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pinusc 6y agoI think subtitles and captions are the same foe YouTube-DL. However, some videos only have auto-generated captions, and YouTube-DL doesn't download these... by default. There is an option to force the download of both generated and even translated captions.
- undershirt 6y ago--write-auto-sub (thanks)
- ngcc_hk 6y ago“ Quota impact: A call to this method has a quota cost of 50 units.”?
- jsmith45 6y ago
- fy20 6y agoDoes anyone know of a tool (extension?) that will translate captions (even badly) for YouTube videos? Sure I could you use youtube-dl and run the result through Google Translate, but I'm looking for something automated.
- Thorrez 6y agoThis is natively supported on youtube, at least some of the time. I think it might be that you have to have youtube's UI language set to a different language than is spoken in the video.
- yorwba 6y agoAs far as I can tell, it's available on desktop, but neither in mobile browsers nor the app. The video language being the same or different from the UI language didn't seem to make a difference. My current working theory is that they couldn't figure out a way to fit a two-level menu on a phone screen, so they just cut that feature...
- fy20 6y agoI just tested, and yes on desktop there is an 'Auto-translate' option, even for videos with 'auto-generated captions'. However on mobile (YouTube app on Android, Firefox, Chrome) and my TV the 'Auto-translate' option is missing, so I can only view the generated subtitles in the original language. I mostly watch on mobile or TV, so :-/
- rmrfstar 6y agoSomeone else posted youtube-dl args to get the transcript in its original language. It's pretty easy to rig a translation script using pretrained models. [1] If you are building a historical dataset, it's probably better to cache the transcript in its original language, so you can benefit from improvements to translation models as they develop. [1] https://huggingface.co/transformers/task_summary.html https://huggingface.co/transformers/task_summary.html
- Leftium 6y ago
- stadt 6y agoStill waiting for the pictographic subtitles to load... ;D
- emptysands 6y agoCheck out Yinote. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/yinote/fhpgggnmdlmekfdpkdgeiccfkignhkdf?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/yinote/fhpgggnmdlm...
- knolax 6y agoJesus you can have more than one word in the name of a piece of software. At least call it "Hieroglyph Reader" or something. Can't tell what it does by the name and there's a namespace conflict.
- xuhu 6y agoThe more common the name, the more important the project. Even more so if it reuses the name of an existing project.
- stef25 6y agoThis looks great. Tried it out with two videos and the resulting text seems to cut off around 3500 words.
- sali0 6y agoHey, sorry about that. I'm not sure what caused that. Could you give me the video so I can test it out?
- Jugurtha 6y agoI use "YouTube Captions Search" Chrome extension. This allows the following workflow: - I am on a YouTube video view - I click on "Closed Captions" (CC) in the YouTube player. - The extension icon in Chrome's toolbar becomes red. - I click on the extension icon - A search text field appears - I type a word or a sentence - There is an area with timestamps and sentences containing the words I search This is useful in two ways: 1. For videos I have already watched that I know contain a segment of interest to me and I want to re-listen to that segment. I go to the video, type the words, click on the timestamp and it takes me straight to the timestamp of interest. 2. Discovery: when I'm learning about something specific and there's a one hour video and I want to know if they're addressing my specific question. I type the words and see how many times they're talking about the topic (density). I read the sentences, and then click on the timestamps directly before committing to the video. So when I'm actively learning about a topic, I might have a backlog of ten videos, this speeds up things enormously. One more hack: I use "Video Speed Controller"[1] to speed up videos up to 16x. For talks that don't have a link to the slides, I'll use the 16x video as a "presentation slides". One hour becomes about 4 minutes long and I just look at the slides on the screen. If I like the treatment of the topic, I'll watch the video. If not, I won't. This allows me again to have a backlog of 20 videos to watch, go through them really fast, discard the ones that do not have a deep enough treatment of the topic of interest, and only commit to the videos that do. - [0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-captions-search/kimbeggjgnmckoikpckibeoaocafcpbg https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-captions-s... - [1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-controller/nffaoalbilbmmfgbnbgppjihopabppdk https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...
- fudged71 6y agoI’ve been interested in making a list of keywords and key phrases that can highlight the ‘meat’ of instructional YouTube videos. Which words/phrases have been useful for you to search?
- Jugurtha 6y agoI work at a company and we do consulting for enterprise. We make machine learning products. I need to learn whatever needs to be learned to deliver value to customers (domain + making product). We also build https://iko.ai https://iko.ai, a machine learning platform to simplify our work. I need to learn whatever needs to be learned to make that product.
- causehealth101 6y agoWow, this is made for me. Youtube's own "view transcript" tool spits out a small side window with about 5 words per line. For me, that's a pain to read. This transcript is displayed in paragraph form, nearly as readable as a typical article. One very specific question: is there a way to get it on Instapaper's mobile app? While it transfers well on the web version, clicking on the transcript through the app takes me to the web version. Thank you for this contribution!
- sali0 6y agoGlad you like it! I am not sure why it wouldn't work on mobile Instapaper. I hope you find a workaround.
- dr_dshiv 6y agoI'm interested in the metaphysical theories presented by yoga instructors. There are zero scholarly papers that deal with transcripts of yoga classes. Now I can easily gather a corpus of text from the huge number of yoga classes online!
- rasz 6y agoor just open url defined here JSON.parse(ytplayer.config.args.player_response).captions.playerCaptionsTracklistRenderer.captionTracks[0].baseUrl
- sali0 6y agoHey all! I am one of the creators of Hieroglyph. I know its not perfect, but it was a small project my friend and I wanted to make to solve our own problem. We wanted to be able to ctrl+f and find some information in videos. There is still so much to add. We created it to get some practice with web development and to test out some ideas. I did not expect it to land here to be honest. Please let me know if you have any questions.
- herbertl 6y agoThank you for making it!
- bausano_michael 6y agoI am just working on pretty much the same tool: subscanner.com My goal is to get the content indexed on search engines to make youtube transcripts browsable. I have decided not to use auto-generated subtitles as they are of poor quality and search engines do not like broken English. However since I am not done with the tool completely yet, I might reconsider this. An example video on subscanner: https://subscanner.com/rjDX5ItsOnQ https://subscanner.com/rjDX5ItsOnQ