What I'd really like is a service that edits down YouTube videos by removing all the stock footage and talking head crap, then speeding up the audio to fit over the remaining novel information—whether that's new battlefield footage, electron micrographs, demonstrations of machining techniques, or just elephant toothpaste. The talking head filler seems like it would be easy to recognize, but stock footage recognition presumably would have a significant false negative rate, which is okay.<p>This would reduce some videos to just a transcription, which would be the ideal outcome, I think. The less of my limited time on Earth I waste watching some dumbshit reading a script at a camera, the better. Summarizing the transcript further like this site does might be occasionally useful, of course.
What if we summarize all the information in the world into a few hundred volumes of human knowledge, then summarize those into a 10,000 pages book, then that into a 10 long form essays, then those into a 100,000 chars blog post, then that into a pamphlet and finally we summarize one more time into a single tweet.
Hi HN! I'm the author of this service. Thank you for your support.<p>There may have been some temporary downtime due to residential proxy running out of bandwidth. I have purchased additional bandwidth. (I run this service for free.)<p>There also may be some errors with particular videos because they are not accessible in certain regions. For now all requests to YouTube originate from United States, but open to change in the future to some kind of round-robin or fallback system.<p>I know it's not perfect. I developed the tool originally for my own use. It's open source and I'm open to any patches or pull requests.<p>Enjoy!
Tried it on 3 random videos I watched, and the results were... mostly good, albeit mixed.<p>On the one hand, it got my video about a Mario & Luigi: Brothership glitch dead right, immediately listing where you'd need to die to get an item early and what you'd get out of it.<p>It also did an okay job summarising a Zelda dungeon analysis video by someone I'm subscribed to, with some info on why that dungeon was well-designed that clearly came from the video.<p>Unfortunately, it did a poor job at summarising a video about plagiarism in the YouTube speedrunning essay space, associating the problem with smaller creators rather than the person the video was about and leaving out far too many details to be useful.<p>This seems to confirm my assumptions about how an AI summariser would work in general; if the original media is a straightforward piece about one easily understandable topic, then it'll do fine and work about as well as a human would. If it's a longer piece with multiple points backed by various examples, then it'll struggle to summarise it in a way that makes sense.
Idea hackneyed since LLM's appeared. Cool that implementation is open-source, though yt automatic captions are sometimes completely off-point, especially when people talking in the video don't have a diction of a tv show host.<p>I wonder if an idea found it's niche after all? Do you guys summarise you videos to short texts and that leaves you satisfied? For me video is video, I can relax, sit and watch/listen to it. With text it is different, it is a mental exercise to read and process it, so turning video into text feels like an essential downgrade. I would prefer watching at 1.5/2x speed instead of text summary if I want to finish it faster.
I tried with a few Thunderf00t videos. He has good analysis, but the guys repeats everything too many times. Many are about silly impossible "inventions" / scams, but this is an experiment that he published in Nature Chemistry:<p><a href="https://tldw.tube/?v=LmlAYnFF_s8" rel="nofollow">https://tldw.tube/?v=LmlAYnFF_s8</a> "<i>High speed camera reveals why sodium explodes!</i> --> "<i>Coulombic explosion. (Sodium and water reaction)</i>"
Seems to use gpt-4o under the hood. I wonder if using Deepseek would make any difference in quality.<p>I used to have nice and detailed summaries with this app lasting many paragraphs. It used to be totally free and you could submit as many links as you wanted. However they started forcing you to wait dozens of hours between summaries or pay for credits. I haven't found a YouTube summarizer as high quality since.<p><a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.emote.youtube_summarizer">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.emote.yout...</a><p>I'm thinking one could replicate such a service pretty easily and be able to plug in your Deepseek API token instead. It would be convenient if such services let you "bring your own API key" so to speak, so you'd only have to manage one bank of credits. But it's understandable that lots of people want in on a slice of the AI pie right now.
Something that could be interesting is processing all videos in some subgenre, like say "game development", rank them by popularity, summarize them, and then analyze for patterns. This would be valuable information for anyone wanting to make a video with higher chances of being shown to people.
Pretty cool. The summary at first was helpful, but then delves into repeating itself. I tried it on John wick. Here’s the latter part of the summary.<p>The video calls out the cliché tropes and logical inconsistencies in "John Wick," showing how they detract from the film's emotional impact. The critique outlines the logical flaws in "John Wick," focusing on cliché tropes that undermine the film’s emotional depth. The video critiques the logical inconsistencies and clichés in "John Wick," highlighting how they reduce its emotional impact. The critique points out clichés and logical flaws in "John Wick." The video notes clichés and flaws in "John Wick." The video critiques "John Wick."
I made a shortcut for iPad to do more or less the same thing and promised myself to keep “engineering” the prompt but work pretty well as it is.<p>Link: <a href="https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/fbb5a315cb354fbf903bcfa4f409ba95" rel="nofollow">https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/fbb5a315cb354fbf903bcfa4f40...</a><p>What the shortcut does is taking the transcript of the video and asking your ChatGPT app to extract main ideas, quotes, and facts.<p>The prompt comes originally from fabric CLI tool <a href="https://danielmiessler.com/blog/fabric-origin-story" rel="nofollow">https://danielmiessler.com/blog/fabric-origin-story</a>
For specific questions I get the transcript from <a href="https://tactiq.io/tools/youtube-transcript" rel="nofollow">https://tactiq.io/tools/youtube-transcript</a> then copy paste to a LLM and append my question
Tried Andrej Karpathy's latest video -- <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xTGNNLPyMI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xTGNNLPyMI</a><p>It said "too long video"<p>Exactly, duh ;D
An error occurred: tuple indices must be integers or slices, not str<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks-_Mh1QhMc&list=PLWDUzz3hCDJL313cxfWSnTh5X0ZtP1oVU&index=3&pp=iAQB" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks-_Mh1QhMc&list=PLWDUzz3hCD...</a>
The sweet spot of most YouTube videos was supposedly under 10 minutes. What happened? These days, the typical YouTube videos are almost 30 minutes long. I'm fine with documentaries and the like. Is there a way to bring back the idea that under 10-minute videos work the best?
I tried it to summarize some lecture videos. And the summary ranged from average to bad. Nothing I couldn't already get from the description. Even ChatGPT 4o spits out far better content.<p>So far my method has been to take the transcript and use an LLM with customized prompt for summary.
Getting a "Too long video" message in response to a query is frustrating to the user, and, well, redundant information, so contrary to the purpose of increasing information density.
Interestingly, YouTube also lends itself for this sort of thing for movies. You can watch scenes from movies and get the gist, while only spending ~30min on a movie. It's a great way to watch mediocre movies - they're not so horrible (1), and you do get the entertainment value without being exposed to the shlocky-est parts.<p>(1) Eg, if you skip the beach scene, Terminator Dark Fate is... palatable! But yeah, the reasons for mediocrity typically still shine through a bit.
I tried using it on a 2-hour video and it said that… the video is too long?<p>Kind of like hiring a painter to paint your house and him refusing the job because your house is unpainted.
This is so fun!<p>Could you make it compatible with openrouter please?
I see you use the openai binding that allows you to specify a different base_url so that would work out of the box and integrates well with the .env<p>```
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(
base_url="<a href="https://openrouter.ai/api/v1" rel="nofollow">https://openrouter.ai/api/v1</a>",
api_key="<OPENROUTER_API_KEY>",
)
```
I see the value in this, and thank you for posting it.<p>That said, it really makes me wonder at how insanely inefficient information transfer over the internet can become. This is like... doing OCR on screenshots of PDFs to send messages, rather than just passing around text. Nice, searchable, parseable, indexible, extremely compressible, editable, readily versionable text.
It seems to have some reasonable length limitations. It refused to distill this epic analysis of dungeons across 3 games, since the video approaches 4 hours long: <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PajArJbPfpE" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PajArJbPfpE</a>
What is really cool about this is that my attention span is kept after reading the summary.<p>Like the following video: <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JBkAKCJJuFQ" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JBkAKCJJuFQ</a><p>I am not getting emotionally invested to the point of losing the end focus of the speaker. Actually now I am looking forward to it.
My struggle with all these tools is that it’s been universally easier to type “summarize this video <link>” into chatGPT than to even keep track of the link to service. I desperately want a openAI-powered business to be viable, but it’s a snake eating its tail
This is not the only service of its kind. There is also the Video Gist:<p><a href="https://www.videogist.co/" rel="nofollow">https://www.videogist.co/</a><p>I can't speak to the differences between the two. Once casual observation is that the one posted by the OP seems to be a lot faster..
I thought maybe I'd finally be able to through a Wendigoon video with this, since I'm generally interested in the things he talks about but can't stand some of his linguistic tics. Unfortunately looks like most of his videos are too long for this, which I guess is ironic considering the name.<p>TL;DP
I use YouTube's transcript feature or 2x speed for slow talkers.<p>Especially with political commentary many YouTubers stretch their content or talk slowly for more ad deliveries. It is annoying, because often there is an important five minute section hidden in a one hour video.
There's also a funny one like <a href="https://tldw.tech/" rel="nofollow">https://tldw.tech/</a> which makes everything into a The Verge video.
Cool! I had thought about doing the same but in a Chrome extension that would use Llama 3.2 with WebGPU, but when I tested it, it was very slow and sometimes crashed the browser.
From some light testing, the results here are pretty lackluster. I've used videosummarizerai.com in the past via ChatGPT and the ability to specify the format of the information you're looking for is a huge plus.<p>Here's the summary of this video [<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1WkG8WuRcg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1WkG8WuRcg</a> (AoE2 video)] from tldw.tube:<p>> The video discusses the most powerful team combinations in the "10x Shared Civ Bonus" mod for Age of Empires II. It highlights how certain civilizations, when combined strategically, can create overpowering unit types and tactics. The focus is on four-player team compositions that leverage unique benefits: for instance, the combination of Franks or Incas for free castles, Japanese and Tatars for rapid trebuchet fire, and Celts for enhanced onagers. The video also explores various combinations for cavalry and infantry, including the Goths for swift unit production and a range of secondary civilizations to amplify strengths. Commenters contributed ideas for clever combos, emphasizing the limitless potential for exploiting the mod's mechanics to develop broken strategies that can quickly overwhelm opponents by accelerating unit production or enhancing existing attributes, thereby showcasing the humorous and chaotic nature of the mod's gameplay.<p>and here's the summary of the same video from videosummarizerai.com via ChatGPT with the prompt "Give a summary of all civ combos mentioned in order":<p>> Here’s a summary of the civilization combinations mentioned in the video in order:<p><pre><code> Castle Spam Team:
Incas: Free castles and massive villager armor bonuses.
Teutons: Adds +30 range to castles.
Celts: Castles fire at four times the usual rate.
Sicilians or Spanish: Increased castle build speed (castles built in 30 seconds).
Ultimate Trebuchet Team:
Japanese: Faster fire rate and instant packing/unpacking for trebuchets.
Tatars: Adds +20 range to trebuchets.
Britons: Adds splash damage and perfect accuracy with Warwolf.
Saracens or Celts: Additional attack bonuses or faster firing trebuchets.
Best Onager Combo:
Celts: Increased fire rate and durability for onagers.
Mongols: Super-speed movement for onagers.
Koreans: Adds +10 range and removes minimum range.
Slavs: Makes onagers free.
Scorpion Team:
Khmer: Adds range and additional projectiles.
Romans: Reduces cost and increases attack rate.
Ethiopians: Adds torsion engine tech for better area damage.
Chinese: Adds huge damage to projectiles for almost quadrupled effectiveness.
[goes on to list remaining 4 team combos]</code></pre>
I tried it on music videos, and with most of them I got the distinct impression it's drawing from the description or external info, maybe PR, because it was very generic, the funniest I saw being <a href="https://tldw.tube/?v=kxstMJY2Q28" rel="nofollow">https://tldw.tube/?v=kxstMJY2Q28</a><p>I was about to give up because after all, this isn't for music videos, tried something it could not <i>possibly</i> do well with, and I'm impressed, against my will.<p><a href="https://tldw.tube/?v=7X62OJG6Whg" rel="nofollow">https://tldw.tube/?v=7X62OJG6Whg</a><p>This isn't just an acceptable summary, this is really good, considering how much could be missed (like it did with <a href="https://tldw.tube/?v=6k7kk1lUnis" rel="nofollow">https://tldw.tube/?v=6k7kk1lUnis</a> for example).