Hi guys! I’m a typical lifelong learner. I’m constantly studying smth ranging from emotinal intelligence to NodeJs. In the last few years my content consuming process mostly moved to Youtube. And recently I’ve decided to make my workflow as smooth as possible. I’m so excited to share and get your feedback.
My typical Youtube learning workflow
My typical workflow while studying particular video usually includes 2 stages:
Fast aquaintance + timestamping
Initially I watch video at an accelerated rate (usually 1,5x). During this process I’m saving timestamps for each video moment, where I found a piece of valuable information. Usually I do it from my phone on the go or in a public transport. My “time-notches” go straight to Telegram (“Saved messages”). To save them I use “out of the box” Telegram feature. I just reply to Youtube video link message with timecode and Telegram automatically turns reply into the timepointed link.
Taking notes by timestamps
Getting home, I’m going over all “notches” and review the video in the corresponding timepoints to take notes into Obsidian.
This approach is OK in general. However, I found that for long videos it would be very handy to save a small piece of subtitles along with a timestamp. There are 3 benefits:
a. After watching the video and saving timestamps you can take notes mostly without any need to launch the video. That extremely speeds up the process.
b. You can prioritize your note taking process, what is extremelly valuable when your have to go through a long video and have limited amount of time. Having acquired the “whole picture” after watching the complete video, you can even exclude the particular timestamps from revision.
c. You can quickly go through your “info-notches” to get the whole picture even without taking notes of the video.
Having this in mind, I decided to create Telegram bot, which is able to pull out subtitles for the particular video timepoint and collect all these runtime “marks” to MD files (to be easily transferred to Obsidian with a click of a button).
The new scenario
Now I’m using my bot for saving Youtube video timestamps with subtitles around. The scenario is as following:
1. Send Youtube video link to the bot:
2. Then just send messages with timestamps formatted as following: “mm” (minutes), “mm:ss” (minutes seconds) or “hh:mm:ss” (hours minutes seconds). Bot turns them into links with timepoints and save with subtitles. Right after the timestamp (in the same message) you can also add any text. Bot will recognize it as a comment related to the particular timecode:
You can also send comments and pictures which are not related to the concrete timepoint.
3. When you are done watching one or several videos, just click “Collect all” button. Bot will pack your notches and comments to MD files, which you can download right away into your vault.
To end up with)
Just several points to end up with:
- I’m planning to make bot as good as possible to satisfy Youtube learner needs. If you have any ideas on new features to add to the bot, just let me know. Also please notify me about bugs (if you meet them).
- If bot is not responding to your input, just restart it with
/startcommand - If you want to track bot updates and vote for feature priority, please follow this TG channel.
