Disclaimer
Is this project open source? Yes
Is this project completely free? No (free tier with a 3-sync lifetime allowance, plus an optional one-time Pro license at $19.99)
Is this project vibe-coded beyond the author’s ability to comprehend how it works? No
Community Directory: [Watch Later Synthesizer](https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/watch-later-synthesizer)
If you use the Web Clipper to save YouTube videos into your vault, this one’s for you.
I build small backlog-triage plugins, and this is the seventh in that line. I should be honest up front: I’m not a heavy watch-later hoarder myself. I found this pain through research — forums, Reddit, IndieHackers. The same picture kept coming up: a saved-video folder that just grows, turns into a guilt object, and never gets watched. People wanted a way to deal with the pile without feeling like they’d failed it.
So the framing I landed on, borrowed from a comment someone left on an earlier launch of mine, is: not “did you watch everything,” but “what did you miss that was actually worth watching?” It reframes the pile from a guilt object into something you can query.
What it does (v1 is triage only):
- A watch-or-skip verdict for each saved video, with a one-line reason and a likely topic
- The recurring themes across your whole backlog, so you can see what you actually keep saving
- A conservative “safe to delete” list — only obvious junk, never anything substantive
- A separate advisory list of time-sensitive videos that have likely gone stale
It reads video metadata (title, channel, description, etc. from the Web Clipper note), not transcripts — YouTube blocks client-side caption fetching, so I don’t pretend to do deep summaries. This is triage, not a recap.
Architecture, for the people who care about that here:
- Bring your own AI key (Anthropic, OpenAI, or OpenRouter)
- No server, no account, no telemetry. The only place your data goes is the AI provider you configure, with your own key.
- Offline license verification (Ed25519), so there’s no license server phoning home
- One-time Pro license. No subscription — I have no recurring cost to justify one.
One honest caveat: the watch/skip distinction is only as good as the model you bring. Small or free models tend to under-skip and rate everything “watch.” A capable model gives verdicts you can actually trust. Tiny models are fine for testing the pipeline.
I’d genuinely like to hear: for those of you who clip videos into Obsidian, how do you currently decide what’s worth watching versus what you just let rot in the folder? Curious whether the watch/skip framing matches how you’d actually want to triage, or whether you’d want something different.
Pro license (optional): [Gumroad](https://ibrh96.gumroad.com/l/lljtqy)