frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Show HN: YT NoteTaker – Simple Manual Note Taking on YouTube Videos

https://kavinaidoo.github.io/ytnt/
2•kavinaidoo•1y ago
Hi HN,

YTNT is a simple web-app for manually typing notes while watching a YouTube video. Simultaneously type and control playback with keyboard shortcuts. Export to Word (.docx) when you're done.

I'm seeking general feedback.

NOTES:

- The only way to "save" (for now) is to export to a Word .docx

- Speech-to-text only works in Chrome

GitHub: https://github.com/kavinaidoo/ytnt

Blog Post: http://archive.today/FRqwp

Thanks, Kavi

Comments

Leftium•1y ago
I forked oTranscribe and added some features to solve a similar problem.

- demo: https://otranscribe.netlify.app/?vsl=definedefine

- source code: https://github.com/Leftium/oTranscribe

- CLI tool to generate OTR (oTranscribe) files from (YouTube) SBV/TTML files: https://github.com/Leftium/otrgen

In my case, I wanted to start with the (auto-generated) YouTube transcript and get clickable timestamps. This makes it much faster to search through the content of a video: I can read/search much faster than watching a video, even on 2X speed.

I could also add my own notes to the transcript.

If you add support for loading transcripts like this, it could work cross-browser without the microphone/speech-to-text.

kavinaidoo•1y ago
Aha, starting with the YouTube transcript is a great idea. I wanted to start with it but I couldn't find a way to get it from the YouTube iFrame API so I went with the Web Speech API to listen and convert.

Forgive me for the confusion, the demo link implies that the transcript is loaded from the video but I see in the code that there's a pre-existing "/txt/definedefine.md" that is loaded. How are these SBV/TTML files downloaded from YouTube in the first place? I assume that it is a separate process? I see you are then using otrgen to presumably convert these so they can be used by oTranscribe.

If I could load the transcripts dynamically when loading the YouTube video that would be a great feature.

Leftium•1y ago
The demo simply demonstrates how I used my tool. It requires some manual set up:

- TTML files are downloaded via CLI: `yt-dlp.exe --skip-download --write-auto-sub --sub-format ttml`

- TTML files are converted to the OTR .MD format via my CLI tool

- The MD file can be dragged & dropped onto the web app.

---

I think it is possible to download SBV/TTML files, but the download must be done from the server due to CORS restrictions.

My app didn't go this far due to limitations of the (serverless) platform it is hosted on. Also it was faster to just do the steps manually vs. developing a server that does it.

I have seen many services that download the transcript. Here are a few:

- https://youtubetranscript.com

- https://kagi.com/summarizer

- https://www.tubepen.com

However, note YouTube may block your server if you download too many transcripts: https://kagifeedback.org/d/4451-universal-summarizer-cant-fi...

kavinaidoo•1y ago
I think I'll just have to stick with my current method for now, looks like the only way to get it done with static hosting.
Leftium•1y ago
I'm planning a beat-aware YouTube player. Unfortunately, it is not possible to access the audio stream data across the YouTube embed. (For beat-detection analysis.)

I considered using the microphone like this. It's nice to see it works. Although there seems to be a time limit to how long the microphone can record?

My plan was to download video (youtube-dlp), then make a CLI tool that analyzes and uploads the beat-detection data. An advantage of the CLI tool is it can complete the analysis faster than playing the video at 1X.

kavinaidoo•1y ago
Yeah, I also wanted to "pipe" the audio directly to the Web Speech API but had to resort to using the mic. Another feature I wanted to add was to have a keyboard shortcut insert a screenshot of the video into the notes. Handy for diagrams etc but I hit some roadblocks there too and the workarounds were getting crazy.

Regarding the time-limit, I'm entirely accessing the audio stream using the Web Speech API and it "decides" (usually when there's a sufficient pause) when to finalize a recognition result. It was also firing a "recognition.onend" event after a certain amount of time (some old details here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38213580/chromes-webkits...) so I have a workaround where if the user did not turn off speech-to-text, it is immediately restarted. You'll see console warnings "userStopped == false - trying to restart" when this happens.

I assume you'll have no such issues because you'll be handling the "raw" audio data and not working through this API. Also, I've noticed that when using the Web Speech API on Safari, it does not "hear" what the tab is playing. It only hears external audio. I'm not sure whether this will be an issue for you but for me it means my app is Chrome only (suboptimal). Forgive me for my naïveté in this arena, It's the first time I'm using any browser audio API.

Would your tool run on a server and work with a frontend for YT link ingestion or will you just use it yourself from the cli?

Leftium•1y ago
Ideally, my tool would run on the server. Especially if I wanted to monetize the service. (However I think there may be legal issues that are larger than the technical ones...)

However it's just a small hobby project. So realistically I think this is how it will work:

- If user tries to load a video without beat data yet, instructions are shown for how to add the beat data. The instructions will be running CLI command like `npx upload-beat-data [YOUTUBE-URL]`

- The CLI tool will download the audio, then upload the beat data to my site.

- The site will also log which videos got a lot of requests, but are missing beat data. So I can manually add the beat data myself.

Websites will look like in the future

https://www.interactlabs.ai/?auto_open=true
1•Suyash_karn•31s ago•1 comments

Red Hat Delivers On-Premises Cost Telemetry to Meet Data Sovereignty Demands

https://cloudnativenow.com/features/red-hat-delivers-on-premises-cost-telemetry-to-meet-data-sove...
1•CrankyBear•53s ago•0 comments

Session Amnesia: The Hidden Cost of Stateless AI Coding Assistants

https://www.aisterna.com/post/session-amnesia-the-hidden-cost-of-stateless-ai-coding-assistants
1•yanbing•1m ago•0 comments

Silicate-derived calcium as a pathway to low-carbon Portland cement

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44458-026-00056-4
1•PaulHoule•1m ago•0 comments

RSS is not dead. It just changed audience

https://hoeijmakers.net/rss-is-not-dead-it-just-changed-audience/
1•speckx•1m ago•1 comments

Asteroid Mining Simulator 2026

https://play.unity.com/en/games/902159c3-5843-431e-90d1-ae74881006bb/asteroid-mining-simulator-2026
1•merridew22•4m ago•1 comments

Show HN: We missed Winamp, so we built an audio player for macOS

https://www.advanced-research.net/180db
4•surganov•6m ago•0 comments

AI, "Humanity", and Dr. Manhattan Syndrome

https://www.personfamiliar.com/p/ai-humanity-and-dr-manhattan-syndrome
1•gampleman•8m ago•0 comments

I-have-ADHD – Claude Code plugin for ADHD-friendly output

https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd
1•ashitlerferad•8m ago•0 comments

What Is Blackout Poetry? Examples and Inspiration

https://writers.com/what-is-blackout-poetry-examples-and-inspiration
1•Tomte•9m ago•0 comments

Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled

https://blog.chrislewis.au/snowboard-kids-2-is-100-decompiled/
1•knackers•9m ago•0 comments

Optimizing Code with AI

https://www.spectralcore.com/blog/optimizing-code-with-ai
1•metadata•9m ago•1 comments

Distribution Fine Tuning (DFT): A post training step that fixes LLM writing

https://twitter.com/rosmine/status/2056406211369541947
1•miohtama•10m ago•0 comments

Knowledge Graphs for AI Coding Assistants

https://graphify.net/
1•pmg101•17m ago•0 comments

Static websites had a good run

https://www.interactlabs.ai/blog-article/introducing-interact-ai
2•Suyash_karn•17m ago•0 comments

Situational Awareness LP Q1 13F Filings Are Public

https://kiankyars.github.io/investing/2026/05/18/situational-awareness-lp.html
1•kyars•21m ago•0 comments

Musk Warns of Killer AI, While He and Silicon Valley Cash in on AI That Kills

https://theintercept.com/2026/05/01/elon-musk-openai-lawsuit-trial/
2•cdrnsf•22m ago•0 comments

Pentagon walks away from Canada-U.S. defence board

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trump-canada-us-joint-defence-board-9.7203211
4•Teever•22m ago•0 comments

There Is a Soul, but Not a Transcendent One

https://www.noemamag.com/there-is-a-soul-but-not-a-transcendent-one/
1•Gooblebrai•23m ago•0 comments

Moving my app subscriptions to Europe

https://rewiring.bearblog.dev/moving-my-subscriptions-to-europe/
2•Mossy9•24m ago•0 comments

Tour of Datacenters in the SLC Valley

https://discuss.systems/@ricci/116556373280824179
1•zdw•24m ago•0 comments

Why does Amazon have no Western rivals?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg7p5nr307mo
3•devonnull•25m ago•0 comments

Game Theory in the Age of AI

https://medium.com/@rakesh.sheshadri44/game-theory-when-everyone-uses-ai-b771f863051f
1•alexdesouza•25m ago•0 comments

Canvas hack: is it a good idea to pay a ransom, and what happens to the data?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/17/canvas-hack-cyber-criminals-data-ransom-paid
3•billybuckwheat•28m ago•0 comments

New Windows 'MiniPlasma' zero-day exploit gives SYSTEM access, PoC released

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/new-windows-miniplasma-zero-day-exploit-gives-sys...
2•akyuu•30m ago•0 comments

Admin of darknet market that shut down in 2019 arrested after buying gold bars

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndga/pr/german-citizen-charged-laundering-funds-linked-prominent-dar...
1•rzk•34m ago•0 comments

Building audit logging in Postgres without triggers

https://runharbor.com/blog/2026-05-18-building-automatic-contextual-clinical-trial-audit-logging-...
2•18nleung•34m ago•0 comments

Why Distributed Training Is Hard: DTensor and the Costs of Abstraction

https://runwayml.com/news/dtensor-distributed-training
3•nielka•35m ago•0 comments

From Open Source Software to Open Source Strategy

https://p3institute.substack.com/p/from-open-source-software-to-open
4•AnhTho_FR•36m ago•0 comments

Displaying a crafted file in Tabby terminal can run shell commands

https://github.com/Eugeny/tabby/security/advisories/GHSA-qr3x-j8g9-xhf6
2•logickkk1•36m ago•0 comments