Obsidian and Youtube Workflow

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Introduction

Aside from books, most of my learning happens through youtube, but could not find a good workflow for taking notes from youtube. Most were eithier paid or lacking. After looking around for a few days I think a came up with a passable workflow. I am interested in what you think

The workflow

I dont take notes while wathining the video; I use this extension to bookmark points of interest.

Afterwards when i get free time to take notes, I open transcript of the video and copy paste the relevant section into obsidian with timestamps(you can automate some of this with templater)

Now i have a note with youtube video title with embedded iframe and relevanted parts with timestamps. Next I create atomic notes with block reference to each of these relavant timestamps

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How do you get the transcript of the video?

YiNote can also be an option for taking notes on videos:
shuowu/yi-note: YiNote browser extension - online video note taking tool

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Right click on the three dots next to the video and there is an option for open transcripts. Yinote is great if you want to take notes while watching the video; I usually take notes later in the day after finishg the video

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I don’t see an option to open transcripts in the 3-dot menu on Youtube (app or website).

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Thanks! It turns out that a video needs to have closed captions or subtitles for that option to appear (I forgot that some YouTube vids don’t have them). Good feature to know!

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I just developed a plugin for exactly this use case—all within Obsidian.

Hope you enjoy: GitHub - juliang22/ObsidianTimestampNotes: This plugin allows side-by-side notetaking with videos. Annotate your notes with timestamps to directly control the video and remember where each note comes from.

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I’m still working out my system for this but, in the process I’ve come across the Media Extended plugin (allows for taking timestamped notes within Obsidian) and YTranscript (allows for retrieving the video transcript).

The thing I’m still looking for, myself, is a simple way of retrieving the video’s basic information – title, channel, overall video length/playtime, etc.