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Show HN: You-tldr – easy-to-read transcripts of Youtube videos
- blisseyGo 6y agoUnfortunately for me, I tried with 4 videos and all got: > The video is no longer available. If this is an unexpected error, please try again in a bit.
- bilater 6y agoSorry about that! Sometimes you need to refresh or wait a minute for it work.
- mapster 6y agoI made a Video to PDF tool a waze back. I made it for dance and workout videos - so I didn't have to remember the many moves later on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-7JCg5fGho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-7JCg5fGho
- gregdoesit 6y agoWorks impressive! Nice work building it.
- bilater 6y agoHey - sorry about that! Can you try again? Sometimes there are errors that good old refreshing fixes!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gregdoesit 6y agoIt started working. Very neat!
- codetrotter 6y agoI tried to transcribe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLzxrzFCyOs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLzxrzFCyOs but subtitles are disabled for it. So I guess that means this service relies on YouTube provided subtitles. Sad times that it didn’t work. It would have been so great to link someone to a transcript of that particular video ;)
- bilater 6y agoHaha good one! Yes we do rely on youtube's subtitles. But are considering adding our own speech to text feature for the videos that don't have subtitles if there is demand ;)
- sixhobbits 6y agoWow the transcription looks better than the automated one rev.com provided for a video where the speaker had a bit of an accent. Very cool - what transcription software is it using?
- bilater 6y agoYoutube!
- jgrossholtz 6y agoNice tool. I tried on mobile. I was able to get a transcript but I ended up in the subscription page by mistake 3 times so I had to try again each time. It seems to me that the free version does not allow me to do enough to make me used to your tool and to end up subscribing to the pro version.
- bilater 6y agoYou can sign up and try for 7 days for free and get all the pro features! :)
- mkl 6y agoShouldn't it be "You-tldw"? The point is to read, rather than spend the time watching.
- codetrotter 6y agoThe pro version additionally will summarize the transcript also according to the feature page. So in case even the transcript itself needs a tldr this has you covered. Besides I would guess that tldr is a more well known acronym than tldw.
- Terretta 6y agoThe TL;DR crowd won’t read a half page “wall of text” on a topic, but seems happy to watch 30 minute videos on how to find a loot chest. The TL;DW crowd would rather take 30 seconds to read the half page it might take to explain that. So both TL;DR and TL;DW are useful.
- solumos 6y agoI built a very similar thing w/ topica.io (now defunct - I could spin it back up if there's interest), but focused on sentence-level and word-level timings to create a sleek interactive transcript[0], and transcribed the videos via third party in the background. My email's in my bio if you want to connect :) [0] https://www.3playmedia.com/resources/recorded-webinars/wbnr-06-18-2020-interactive-transcripts/ https://www.3playmedia.com/resources/recorded-webinars/wbnr-...
- godmode2019 6y agoI built a similar thing but I used a NN to add punctuation to the output subtitles.
- forgingahead 6y agoIs that open-source, or do you have a reference to one that might be? I've heard of punctuator, but keen to see what else people are using.
- michaelbuckbee 6y agoIf you're looking to make money / provide more value with this service I think the angle you should try for is Video to Blog Post. The transcript is fine but I'm not quite sure what problem this solves. Whereas if you were able to take the transcript and spit out a file that was broken into sections (based on YT chapters) and with an attempt to automatically clean up the grammar and remove the "um" style fill words of the spoken version I think this would hit in a very different way.
- tracyhenry 6y agoSecond this. One thing I find useful in quarantine is to extract a cook recipe from video transcripts. What I do now is opening the youtube transcripts (sometimes unavailable), pasting it into Notion and then hand-typing the sections.
- bilater 6y agoThanks for the suggestion! That's a cool idea - will consider putting it on the roadmap :)
- elviejo 6y ago+1000 I've been trying to do this (split into sections and eliminate umms) with recordings of live classes... it takes me 4 hours per each hour of recording. if you can make this process faster the world will throw money at your feet.. at least I will
- artworx 6y agoYou should try Descript[1]. One of its features is automatic filer word removal. I'm not affiliated, just a happy user. 1: https://www.descript.com/filler-words https://www.descript.com/filler-words
- pcthrowaway 6y agoThis name makes no sense. If you're reading the transcript for a Youtube video instead of, y'know, watching the video, then you can't call the transcript a TLDR. At best, it's a TLDW, though it has accessibility applications for people who also intend to watch the video.
- antman 6y agoNice, it's working on mobile Android. The transcript letters could be a bit smaller and the side margins also. An option to keep the video as sticky while scrolling the transcript could also be useful.
- bilater 6y agoThanks for the feedback!
- generalizations 6y agoI did something similar for myself a while back, to put the transcript in a text file. It's a five line bash script that uses youtube-dl to get the closed captions and cleans up the formatting. #!/bin/bash link="$1" fn="captions" youtube-dl --output $fn.%(ext)s --write-auto-sub --skip-download $link sed '/-->/d' $fn.en.vtt | sed '/<c>/d' | sed '/^[[:space:]]\*$/d' | uniq > $fn.txt
- crsr 6y agoThis is brilliant. I was wondering how this tool worked.
- jarbus 6y agoWhen I first saw this project, I was confused as to how it wasn't any different than this feature. To me it seems like they just wrapped youtube-dl to only extract subtitles, made it a webpage, and called it a service.
- woko 6y ago> made it a webpage, and called it a service. That is added value for many people. Some people will google the answer to their question, land on this webpage, read the transcript for this one video that caught their interest in the first place, and be done with their task.
- butz 6y agoClicking on one of Pro functions displays classic alert() dialog and loads "Upgrade" page, losing the loaded video and transcript. You might want to use a custom modal with link to "Upgrade" page which switches only if user clicks on it, and maybe even opens in new tab/page, to keep state.
- bilater 6y agoGotcha - yes I've been meaning to change that since the behavior right now is annoying for the user.
- RBerenguel 6y agoI did a similar (in spirit, to save time) thing [1] to be able to skim on technical presentations: it creates a static HTML page with regular shots from the video with the corresponding Youtube CC on the side. It can help decide if a presentation is worth a watch (or just get the gist of one). Uses youtube-dl and ffmpeg under the hood. [1]: https://github.com/rberenguel/glancer https://github.com/rberenguel/glancer
- gavinray 6y agoWow, I am going to use hell out of this. Such a basic idea when you think about it, but a ton of value.
- RBerenguel 6y agoThanks, when I was done I kind of thought the same. In the end, having the slides would be almost equivalent, but combining a decent enough transcript with the slides adds the minimum "ok, got it" to go from having to watch the video to just being able to skim over it.
- saimiam 6y agoTo take your idea even further, one of the ideas i've been batting around with is to create some sort of learning algo which runs through a video or song, skips forward and back a set number of times to random timestamps to decide if that video or song is something I would be interested in based on my listening history. I feel this is how I currently approach an unfamiliar artist or creator - skip ahead to random points in the video and if I still find them engaging, I rewatch from 0. This type of AI would be so great.
- RBerenguel 6y agoThere's no AI in my program, it's as simple as it sounds: get regular screenshots from the video, collate the corresponding closed captions. One natural improvement of this, though, using some ML would be to focus on the slides when there is a slide+banner+floating head type of presentation. That wouldn't be terribly hard to implement in Python, in Haskell would get me ages (there's Hasktorch, but I havent' tried it, also I have many more years of Python behind me). Your idea sounds intriguing, though. I wonder how one could measure _interest_ in this regard, some form of entropy measure might be right, but how to construct it would be the fun part.
- vhiremath4 6y agoOff-topic but notice you’re a Loom user from the demo video you created. Just wanted to say thank you for recording with us! (co-founder)
- bilater 6y agoLoom is awesome! Thank you for providing such a great service! :)
- raunakdag 6y agoYou guys hiring any interns by any chance? Figured I might as well shoot my shot
- vhiremath4 6y agoFor the first time ever, yes! We read all applications: https://jobs.lever.co/useloom/27c2ffa6-6938-4844-9835-6711f7d65577 https://jobs.lever.co/useloom/27c2ffa6-6938-4844-9835-6711f7...
- denvaar 6y agoNice work
- dehrmann 6y agoI was thinking about making something like this (with the same name!), but my take was going to be a bit more manual with the use case of getting the 10s answer out for a 10m clickbait video.
- dailypeeker 6y agoIf you would like to summarize I suggest to add an on-demand generated word cloud of the transcript
- krispyKrispr 6y agoWhat's the difference between this app and the built-in interactive transcript feature that youtube already has for videos with captions?
- keyle 6y agoObligatory side note of https://tldr.sh https://tldr.sh a fantastic tool about command line tools you might not even have installed! Also a bit of dad sarcasm, shouldn't it be You-tldw?
- throw14082020 6y agoI have too many videos to watch, and this tool sounded like it could help. But it just shows the transcript, so this is not the TLDR. Maybe its meant to be smarter, but it said "No Summary Generated". It didn't help me, as I already skim the transcript on YouTube (its in the meatball menu next to "SAVE")
- kleiba 6y agoNot so impressed, to be honest. 1) I was curious how their ASR software was going to be able to be fast enough for a longer video, and how the WER would be. To make it easy on them, I tried it first with a video that has no background noise. Well, bummer: all they do is scrape the closed captions -- the video I had chosen happened to have no CCs, so it didn't work at all. :-( 2) Okay, I thought, fair enough, let's try their summarization technology. So I found another video that did have closed captions. Clicked on the summary tab: "No summary generated." So then what is this other than an automatic extractor for CCs?
- emgo 6y agoI built something related called https://sidenote.me https://sidenote.me to take notes on YouTube videos, so I understand what you're trying to solve. Congrats on your launch, your interface looks very sleek! My feedback about the product itself is that it's trying to do too much too soon. For example, the set interval slider, and all features in the "Pro Toolbar": are they really useful and necessary to your users? To me it seems they're not, and add confusion. So the question you should ask yourself is: what is the one thing you want to solve for your users, and then make the interface do only this one thing and do it well. Only once you grow a user base you should add new features. Best of luck with your project!
- dijit 6y agoThis is useful. Every so often I see YouTube videos which seem appealing but are egregiously long. I'm talking about the "Guy talks at camera" videos which often exceed 40 minutes. Jeff Geerling or Contrapoints are huge exceptions to this because their content is engaging, well thought out and not "ranty" like the videos I'm talking about. Maybe I have a low attention span, but at some point I'm going to be incredibly sick of this monologuing, just distill this. Please.
- throw14082020 6y ago> This is useful. Have you tried it? I have the same problem as you, and this app seems to just show transcripts, which is already available on the YouTube website. This app doesn't do anything for me.
- throw14082020 6y agoHow is this different to "Open Transcript" on YouTube?
- _theory_ 6y ago...I did not know about this. You are my hero.
- nallo 6y agoTranscribe this https://youtu.be/r7SO-Oq3d5E https://youtu.be/r7SO-Oq3d5E ;) Good work tho
- adamvpro 6y agoAmazing product! Isn't FB planning sth like that?
- gumby 6y agoThank you!