Show HN: CTRL-F for YouTube Videos

https://github.com/Evan-Wildenhain/CTRL-F-VIDEO

by ewild • 2 years ago

137 40 2 years ago

This is a small project i made years ago and updated to whisper last year, i still use it from time to time and thought it might be useful to others, or just put the idea out there for someone better than me to make a better implementation!

popf13• 2 years ago

That's cool, but there is also Firefox extensions that does something similar. There's one for searching comments, and one for searching caption.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-capti...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ycs/

ewild8• 2 years ago

ahh never really looked cause i built my original one in 2019 off of Deepspeech haha just updated it for fun mostly. I know youtube captions themselves are good, but one thing on his code would be that not all videos have captions. Since mine actually downloads the audio and runs it, it would still have values on those older videos that never got captions

sammyatman3• 2 years ago

Ctrl-F across all of youtube: https://www.askyoutube.ai

modeless5• 2 years ago

https://www.youglish.com is also a sort of search engine for YouTube captions, though mostly aimed at short phrases.

popf13• 2 years ago

I searched for my YouTube username and then for the exact title of one video I posted and it didn't find either one.... instead it said the title of my video was not true because it didn't interpret it correctly (but it didn't link to the video).

modeless5• 2 years ago

Ctrl-F can already search the transcript on YouTube. I use it all the time. I guess this could be useful for videos YouTube doesn't have captions for.

stainablesteel• 2 years ago

im not able to do this, can you explain?

atahanacar• 2 years ago

You can find a button for the transcript in the description (or the three dot menu near the dislike button if it's still serving you the older interface). You have to open the transcript first, then Ctrl+f

modeless5• 2 years ago

1. In a desktop web browser, visit a YouTube video with captions, which is almost all of them

2. Click the video description to expand it

3. Scroll down and click the tiny "Show Transcript" button near the bottom (whoever decided to bury it down here was very misguided)

4. Ctrl-F and search any word. Occurrences in the transcript will be highlighted and you can press enter to scroll the transcript to the next one. Click the transcript to seek the video.

I see that this extension shows occurrences on the seek bar which is cool. There is also a slight problem with regular ctrl-F: if you search for a multiple word phrase you might not find it if the phrase happened to be split between two chunks of the transcript. So that could be better in this extension. And of course not every YouTube video has captions, but most do these days.

meatjuice• 2 years ago

Yeah that’s exactly what I thought just after finding out it uses whisper for transcribing. Why not use it when it’s already transcribed?

lopkeny12ko• 2 years ago

https://filmot.com/

qntmfred• 2 years ago

I've been using https://www.appblit.com/scribe to get transcripts into a more readable/ctrl+f-able format

ewild8• 2 years ago

yeah I remember the whole transcript youtube coming out a yearish after i made the first version of this in 2019, but i still perfer the timebar highlighting, but thats just a preference thing

BetterWhisper• 2 years ago

Developed https://www.videototextai.com/ exactly for this reason as it was quite impossible to search videos otherwise. Also you can copy the transcript into a LLM and ask questions from video content like that.

a_wild_dandan• 2 years ago

If we had an extension to skip all the filler garbage in YT videos, I would be ecstatic. Maybe that's doable now? YT captions -> identify fluff timestamps via a browser LLM -> insert segments onto the video timeline, which automatically skip, a la SponsorBlock.

We could slash through Youtubers repeating themselves, making hack jokes, narrating their video title & outline, vapid explanations of common knowledge, etc. Any of which can be customized to your taste via a system prompt!

This kinda semantic filter would actually be an immensely powerful UI tool for all webpages and media, now that I think about it...

sergiotapia• 2 years ago

just use sponsorblock today, works fine on all my devices. https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock

from mobile phone to tv to pc.

jsheard• 2 years ago

Do check the settings too, SponsorBlock is best known for skipping sponsored segments but it also has markers for things like intros, previews, self-promotion, and filler jokes/skits which aren't skipped by default but can be if you want them to.

progman32• 2 years ago

Also look into DeArrow. Replaces clickbait titles and thumbnails.

rustybamba• 2 years ago

Could you explain what's the purpose of the model.pth? I'm trying to get it to work on my Apple Silicon Mac.

ewild8• 2 years ago

The model.pth is a custom LSTM for detecting phonetic similarity, as long as you're running it from the pythons folder ( I didn't manage file location very well) it should work.

mutant• 2 years ago

If you're offloading transcription to openai, why have a local gfx card?

sph• 2 years ago

When all you have is a GPU, every problem can be solved with a custom AI model.

Show HN: CTRL-F for YouTube Videos

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