4 ms·

I would rather just read instead of wasting time watching a video. I take in far more, can reread stuff without messing around with sliders. I can read at my ow

I would rather just read instead of wasting time watching a video. I take in far more, can reread stuff without messing around with sliders. I can read at my own speed. Is there a service yet which turns a video from YouTube or whatever into a ppt? In a smart way ofcourse (based on amount of change of the particular frames). Would pay for that.

thathndude 5y ago
I feel like one of those Reddit or Twitter bots, but: the general rule is that you can read about twice as fast as you can understand spoken word - 300 vs 150 words per minute. I remember reading this my first day in a public speaking class in college. Just one of those factoids that’s stuck with me, and why I’ve always preferred reading articles versus seeking videos. Of course, speed of comprehension is just one consideration. I’m mindful that there are some contexts where a visual is necessary or particularly helpful, and that some folks resonate with visual/spoken word more than written. But this is why I love HN. It’s almost always a link to a written article, and I can pop open comments (which I often do first) for more written text on the subject.
- saurik 5y ago
  I can only speed read for a couple hours at best, as staring so close at something and carefully moving my eyes so quickly is extremely exhausting. I can read at slow speeds for a lot longer, but I am pretty sure it is still horrible for my eyes :(. Either way, it is mentally taxing, as I have to convince my brain to not start talking to itself and begin ignoring the visual input. In contrast, I can spend an entire day listening to people; and, while I am listening, I can be looking into the distance, the way human eyes are supposed to mostly be used. I can walk around, cook and eat food, or even shower, all while listening to people talk. I would argue listening to other people is a much more "human" activity than staring at symbols (despite how much I do this for my passion: software development). I also have no clue where you got those numbers from: the iPad software I have finally found to read PDFs to me has me configure it in words per minute, and I find it reasonable to understand 400 words per minute for long stretches. I bet I could go faster (this software supports 500), but it would likely be mentally taxing. To put in context how preposterous 150 words per minute is, the average person supposedly speaks at 100-130 words per minute according to some random source I just found (which feels right as I took years of linguistics and was going to guess 110-120), and we know people routinely listen to videos at 2x (and so are hitting 200-260). (I think it is also worth noting that actual speed reading is a skill most people do not have. I actually think it quite likely that your average person can read only as fast as they can speak, as I bet that people who are not really really good at reading are subvocalizing. I feel like a lot of people don't consider this when saying everyone should read all the time.)
  - ghufran_syed 5y ago
    What is the name of the ipad reading software you use? I tried using the basic text to speech but can’t figure out how to tell it how to start reading at a point and keep going. Being able to tap to rewind 10 seconds would also be useful
    - saurik 5y ago
      Voice Dream Reader. Given the issues you cite this will be perfect. I really appreciated that it models your progress through the document as "time" as it knows how long it would take to read the whole thing. The only thing I am disliking is that the act of highlight text for something like bookmarking is extremely slow and fidgety (it has word issue like trying to highlight the last character on a line is extremely difficult as the hit test only verifies you are on the right edge of a character, but if you go past the character there is no hit box so it doesn't recognize anything, causing you to have to wiggle your finger on the last character trying to intersect that narrow hit box; it mostly seems to rely on you touching through the character after the character you want to highlight, but there isn't one at the end of a line... they need to like, scan left and see if there is a character to the left of your finger to make this easier).
- tluyben2 5y ago
  This might be different per person? When people talk, I lose concentration after a few minutes, when I read I hold concentration for hours. For me videos and podcasts are the worst for information transfer. Sure I can probably process more, but it stops after minutes for me. Like someone else said; it depends on the subject of course: fixing an issue with a washing machine (not operation, but with the internal electrics or something), a video is faster but otherwise...
  - thathndude 5y ago
    Agreed. That’s why I thought I’d give a shout out to the fact that these are all generalizations: “I’m mindful that there are some contexts where a visual is necessary or particularly helpful, and that some folks resonate with visual/spoken word more than written.“ Strangely, I was never a reader as a child, but took to it as an adult.
- sabas123 5y ago
  With the exception of terse definitions, my comprehension speed of fast spoken word is MUCH better then reading. But I'm probably an outlier in this regard.
- dotancohen 5y ago
  > the general rule is that you can read about twice as fast as you > can understand spoken word - 300 vs 150 words per minute. In my experience the limiting factor is the speed at which one speaks, not the speed at which one listens. I can listen to a 1.5x Youtube video from any speaker comfortable, and 2x for really good speakers such as Marcus House, Scott Manley, or Destin.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  To me the big advantage of reading is that I can easily re-read a section without having to hunt-and-peck 30 times to find the beginning of the section that I want to repeat. Especially with difficult material I tend to go over it many times before I really grok it and doing this with video is absolutely infuriating to the point that I'll usually transcribe the video and then read the transcription, that's still faster and during the transcription process I usually learn quite a bit as well.
dicknuckle 5y ago
For some subjects it's not possible to read everything. For example: woodworking safety for a particular machine, or adjusting the carburetor by ear on a vintage motorcycle.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  Even a searchable transcript for future reference would be great. Bonus points if clicking on a sentence seeks the video to that timestamp.
  - jrmylow 5y ago
    edX videos/lectures have this feature exactly, with a transcript of links next to the video.
  - jasode 5y ago
    >Even a searchable transcript [...] Bonus points if clicking on a sentence seeks the video to that timestamp The Youtube auto-generated transcripts work that way. On most videos, you click on the "..." (3 dots) to access it. Then click on the text fragment and it instantly seeks to that part of the video. Since it uses AI algorithms, there will be misspelled names or technical terms but it's still useful.
anon2020dot00 5y ago
Otter.ai for video to text transcription
mdp2021 5y ago
Now that you mention it, basic implementation is rather trivial: isolate keyframes (which is in the video data¹), aggregate the transcripts chunks (e.g. .vtt should be available) within those keyframes according to the timestamps. Issues: first of all, transcript quality: those of TED (Chris Anderson's "Technology Entertainment Design" conferences) are curated, those of YT are oftentimes not. Then, discriminating significant and less significant keyframes, but if one only needs "decent" instead of "perfect", good compromises for heuristic algorithms (more "parametrized procedures" or "recipes") can surely be found. You are tempting me... In an evening one should get something already usable. Better than a presentation, I see the transcript text with aside thumbnails linking to the full-sized images. As someone who sometimes studies material from video, when I am listening or watching I am not in the strict need for text analysis, and when I am working on the text itself I do not need the video. On the other hand, if I think of the MIT OpenCourseware material and similar (Yale etc.), the "blackboard" shots can be precious to have alongside the text. -- ¹ ffmpeg -i video.mkv -vf "select=eq(pict_type\,I)" -vsync vfr -frame_pts true keyframes-%02d.jpg
- savingsPossible 5y ago
  please, do create this and notify us!
jasode 5y ago
>I would rather just read instead of wasting time watching a video. I take in far more, But sometimes the more efficient reading text instead of listening to a video is negated by not being able to multitask. E.g. The "dead" time of driving, walking a treadmill, raking leaves in the yard, etc can be filled by listening to text. Can't do that with a book. That's why productivity can be helped with both complementary technologies: - audio-to-text: auto-generated transcripts from video for max speed and random seeking - text-to-audio: auto-generated TTS (text-to-speech) from text to multitask while performing a mindless physical activity. This helps get through backlog of books and articles without having to block out dedicated reading time while nothing else is getting done.
- tluyben2 5y ago
  Agreed, but when I really want to learn something (which is always, for me, math, physics andor CS), then I want to read as it focuses me far better. But I agree; if it is not something I want to practice but just learn about, it does work.
edanm 5y ago
> I would rather just read instead of wasting time watching a video. I take in far more, can reread stuff without messing around with sliders. I can read at my own speed. Have you watched many educational YouTube videos lately? I used to also prefer reading for most things, but YouTube and advances in technology have just made educational/edutainment videos so much better than they used to be. There are some incredible videos out there. Of course this depends on the subject, if I want to deep-dive on e.g. maths, of course only a Textbook will suffice.

thathndude 5y ago

I feel like one of those Reddit or Twitter bots, but: the general rule is that you can read about twice as fast as you can understand spoken word - 300 vs 150 words per minute. I remember reading this my first day in a public speaking class in college. Just one of those factoids that’s stuck with me, and why I’ve always preferred reading articles versus seeking videos. Of course, speed of comprehension is just one consideration. I’m mindful that there are some contexts where a visual is necessary or particularly helpful, and that some folks resonate with visual/spoken word more than written. But this is why I love HN. It’s almost always a link to a written article, and I can pop open comments (which I often do first) for more written text on the subject.

saurik 5y ago
I can only speed read for a couple hours at best, as staring so close at something and carefully moving my eyes so quickly is extremely exhausting. I can read at slow speeds for a lot longer, but I am pretty sure it is still horrible for my eyes :(. Either way, it is mentally taxing, as I have to convince my brain to not start talking to itself and begin ignoring the visual input. In contrast, I can spend an entire day listening to people; and, while I am listening, I can be looking into the distance, the way human eyes are supposed to mostly be used. I can walk around, cook and eat food, or even shower, all while listening to people talk. I would argue listening to other people is a much more "human" activity than staring at symbols (despite how much I do this for my passion: software development). I also have no clue where you got those numbers from: the iPad software I have finally found to read PDFs to me has me configure it in words per minute, and I find it reasonable to understand 400 words per minute for long stretches. I bet I could go faster (this software supports 500), but it would likely be mentally taxing. To put in context how preposterous 150 words per minute is, the average person supposedly speaks at 100-130 words per minute according to some random source I just found (which feels right as I took years of linguistics and was going to guess 110-120), and we know people routinely listen to videos at 2x (and so are hitting 200-260). (I think it is also worth noting that actual speed reading is a skill most people do not have. I actually think it quite likely that your average person can read only as fast as they can speak, as I bet that people who are not really really good at reading are subvocalizing. I feel like a lot of people don't consider this when saying everyone should read all the time.)
- ghufran_syed 5y ago
  What is the name of the ipad reading software you use? I tried using the basic text to speech but can’t figure out how to tell it how to start reading at a point and keep going. Being able to tap to rewind 10 seconds would also be useful
  - saurik 5y ago
    Voice Dream Reader. Given the issues you cite this will be perfect. I really appreciated that it models your progress through the document as "time" as it knows how long it would take to read the whole thing. The only thing I am disliking is that the act of highlight text for something like bookmarking is extremely slow and fidgety (it has word issue like trying to highlight the last character on a line is extremely difficult as the hit test only verifies you are on the right edge of a character, but if you go past the character there is no hit box so it doesn't recognize anything, causing you to have to wiggle your finger on the last character trying to intersect that narrow hit box; it mostly seems to rely on you touching through the character after the character you want to highlight, but there isn't one at the end of a line... they need to like, scan left and see if there is a character to the left of your finger to make this easier).
tluyben2 5y ago
This might be different per person? When people talk, I lose concentration after a few minutes, when I read I hold concentration for hours. For me videos and podcasts are the worst for information transfer. Sure I can probably process more, but it stops after minutes for me. Like someone else said; it depends on the subject of course: fixing an issue with a washing machine (not operation, but with the internal electrics or something), a video is faster but otherwise...
- thathndude 5y ago
  Agreed. That’s why I thought I’d give a shout out to the fact that these are all generalizations: “I’m mindful that there are some contexts where a visual is necessary or particularly helpful, and that some folks resonate with visual/spoken word more than written.“ Strangely, I was never a reader as a child, but took to it as an adult.
sabas123 5y ago
With the exception of terse definitions, my comprehension speed of fast spoken word is MUCH better then reading. But I'm probably an outlier in this regard.
dotancohen 5y ago
> the general rule is that you can read about twice as fast as you > can understand spoken word - 300 vs 150 words per minute. In my experience the limiting factor is the speed at which one speaks, not the speed at which one listens. I can listen to a 1.5x Youtube video from any speaker comfortable, and 2x for really good speakers such as Marcus House, Scott Manley, or Destin.
jacquesm 5y ago
To me the big advantage of reading is that I can easily re-read a section without having to hunt-and-peck 30 times to find the beginning of the section that I want to repeat. Especially with difficult material I tend to go over it many times before I really grok it and doing this with video is absolutely infuriating to the point that I'll usually transcribe the video and then read the transcription, that's still faster and during the transcription process I usually learn quite a bit as well.

dicknuckle 5y ago

For some subjects it's not possible to read everything. For example: woodworking safety for a particular machine, or adjusting the carburetor by ear on a vintage motorcycle.

HPsquared 5y ago
Even a searchable transcript for future reference would be great. Bonus points if clicking on a sentence seeks the video to that timestamp.
- jrmylow 5y ago
  edX videos/lectures have this feature exactly, with a transcript of links next to the video.
- jasode 5y ago
  >Even a searchable transcript [...] Bonus points if clicking on a sentence seeks the video to that timestamp The Youtube auto-generated transcripts work that way. On most videos, you click on the "..." (3 dots) to access it. Then click on the text fragment and it instantly seeks to that part of the video. Since it uses AI algorithms, there will be misspelled names or technical terms but it's still useful.

anon2020dot00 5y ago

Otter.ai for video to text transcription

mdp2021 5y ago

Now that you mention it, basic implementation is rather trivial: isolate keyframes (which is in the video data¹), aggregate the transcripts chunks (e.g. .vtt should be available) within those keyframes according to the timestamps. Issues: first of all, transcript quality: those of TED (Chris Anderson's "Technology Entertainment Design" conferences) are curated, those of YT are oftentimes not. Then, discriminating significant and less significant keyframes, but if one only needs "decent" instead of "perfect", good compromises for heuristic algorithms (more "parametrized procedures" or "recipes") can surely be found. You are tempting me... In an evening one should get something already usable. Better than a presentation, I see the transcript text with aside thumbnails linking to the full-sized images. As someone who sometimes studies material from video, when I am listening or watching I am not in the strict need for text analysis, and when I am working on the text itself I do not need the video. On the other hand, if I think of the MIT OpenCourseware material and similar (Yale etc.), the "blackboard" shots can be precious to have alongside the text. -- ¹ ffmpeg -i video.mkv -vf "select=eq(pict_type\,I)" -vsync vfr -frame_pts true keyframes-%02d.jpg

savingsPossible 5y ago
please, do create this and notify us!

jasode 5y ago

>I would rather just read instead of wasting time watching a video. I take in far more, But sometimes the more efficient reading text instead of listening to a video is negated by not being able to multitask. E.g. The "dead" time of driving, walking a treadmill, raking leaves in the yard, etc can be filled by listening to text. Can't do that with a book. That's why productivity can be helped with both complementary technologies: - audio-to-text: auto-generated transcripts from video for max speed and random seeking - text-to-audio: auto-generated TTS (text-to-speech) from text to multitask while performing a mindless physical activity. This helps get through backlog of books and articles without having to block out dedicated reading time while nothing else is getting done.

tluyben2 5y ago
Agreed, but when I really want to learn something (which is always, for me, math, physics andor CS), then I want to read as it focuses me far better. But I agree; if it is not something I want to practice but just learn about, it does work.

edanm 5y ago

> I would rather just read instead of wasting time watching a video. I take in far more, can reread stuff without messing around with sliders. I can read at my own speed. Have you watched many educational YouTube videos lately? I used to also prefer reading for most things, but YouTube and advances in technology have just made educational/edutainment videos so much better than they used to be. There are some incredible videos out there. Of course this depends on the subject, if I want to deep-dive on e.g. maths, of course only a Textbook will suffice.