[HN Gopher] Show HN: You-tldr - easy-to-read transcripts of Yout...
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       Show HN: You-tldr - easy-to-read transcripts of Youtube videos
        
       Author : bilater
       Score  : 46 points
       Date   : 2021-02-06 19:05 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (you-tldr.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (you-tldr.com)
        
       | codetrotter wrote:
       | I tried to transcribe 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 wrote:
         | Haha 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 wrote:
       | Wow 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 wrote:
         | Youtube!
        
       | jgrossholtz wrote:
       | Nice 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 wrote:
         | You can sign up and try for 7 days for free and get all the pro
         | features! :)
        
       | mkl wrote:
       | Shouldn't it be "You-tldw"? The point is to read, rather than
       | spend the time watching.
        
         | codetrotter wrote:
         | The 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.
        
       | generalizations wrote:
       | I 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
        
       | godmode2019 wrote:
       | I built a similar thing but I used a NN to add punctuation to the
       | output subtitles.
        
       | michaelbuckbee wrote:
       | If 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 wrote:
         | Second 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.
        
       | pcthrowaway wrote:
       | This 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.
        
       | solumos wrote:
       | I 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-...
        
       | antman wrote:
       | Nice, 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 wrote:
         | Thanks for the feedback!
        
       | butz wrote:
       | Clicking 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 wrote:
         | Gotcha - yes I've been meaning to change that since the
         | behavior right now is annoying for the user.
        
       | RBerenguel wrote:
       | I 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
        
       | gregdoesit wrote:
       | Works impressive! Nice work building it.
        
         | bilater wrote:
         | Hey - sorry about that! Can you try again? Sometimes there are
         | errors that good old refreshing fixes!
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | gregdoesit wrote:
           | It started working. Very neat!
        
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       (page generated 2021-02-06 23:00 UTC)