[HN Gopher] Youtube2Webpage: Create Websites with Text from Videos
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       Youtube2Webpage: Create Websites with Text from Videos
        
       Author : _Microft
       Score  : 189 points
       Date   : 2023-08-31 06:23 UTC (16 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | frabcus wrote:
       | Related, this is a super useful end user app that summarises
       | videos using an LLM:
       | 
       | https://www.summarize.tech/
        
         | stenioaraujo wrote:
         | This is interesting. I think the scenario it should be used is
         | for non sublte messages, such as sarcasm. I gave it a try with
         | KRAZAM's video and the answer is hilarious when you consider
         | the video intended exactly the opposite.
         | 
         | https://www.summarize.tech/www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF...
         | 
         | > In "The Hustle," the narrator shares their jam-packed daily
         | routine that exemplifies their dedication to productivity. From
         | an early morning workout to late-night preparations for the
         | next day, their schedule is filled with various activities.
         | They efficiently manage their time, incorporating work, social
         | media updates, and even a well-deserved happy hour. The
         | narrator's commitment to self-improvement is also evident
         | through their habit of reading before bed and tweeting
         | inspiring quotes. Overall, this video highlights the narrator's
         | hustle and structured approach to maximizing their day.
        
       | fudged71 wrote:
       | This is great!
       | 
       | What I've wanted for a long time is to use scene detection. So
       | instead of a screenshot at regular intervals, it's only when the
       | visual scene changes.
       | 
       | Maybe if the transcript were turned into paragraphs you could
       | have a little gallery to the side for any scene changes during
       | that paragraph.
        
         | crazygringo wrote:
         | Yes, that is exactly what I came here to comment!
         | 
         | It seems "trivial" enough to detect a total shot change, and
         | then in cases of things like fast-moving action sequences you
         | just collapse all short shots into a single longer shot (e.g.
         | all shots 5 seconds or less get collapsed together with any
         | neighborhing shot 5 seconds or less).
         | 
         | And then pick a single frame from the exact middle, or else the
         | most "still" frame that shows the least change from neighboring
         | ones.
        
           | fudged71 wrote:
           | Have started playing with this and ffmpeg has a scene change
           | detection filter already so it should be fairly
           | straightforward
        
       | siva7 wrote:
       | Finally the web could be searchable again. If Google is clever
       | they should pay big bucks for this as a last resort before
       | getting strangled by Microsofts most important investment
        
       | iamflimflam1 wrote:
       | You really have to wonder what YouTube are doing. Trying to play
       | catch up with TikTok instead of innovating with what they have.
       | 
       | They've had transcriptions for ages - but it's hidden away and
       | practically useless.
       | 
       | The things they could do with a bit of creative thinking...
        
         | gumballindie wrote:
         | > creative thinking...
         | 
         | The death of creative thinking is management and processes.
         | Assembly line work doesnt permit creativity. Google is heading
         | the same route as IBM and other once great corporations made by
         | creative people. When the discussion shifts from ideas to
         | processes and triviliaities it's game over. Long live whatever
         | replaces google. It's over.
        
           | conception wrote:
           | There is a term in business for this I can't remember. Where
           | basically your money comes from business process X and so you
           | protect X at all costs. Which makes it very difficult to
           | innovate away from supporting X. It's almost impossible for a
           | company to pivot to making their money from Y. You see this
           | classically in things like Sears, Woolworths etc. unable to
           | keep up with the times.
           | 
           | The solution to this seems to be to basically start a new
           | company in your company completely separate from your core
           | company more or less. Meta seems to have initially done this
           | very well with their pivot from Facebook to Instagram.
           | Perhaps less great in their metaverse pivot but we'll see.
           | Google set themselves up for success at this with alphabet
           | but I don't think we've really seen them be able to have
           | something they feel like they can really pivot into yet so
           | business X continues to be the focus.
        
         | hypercube33 wrote:
         | I really wish I could search transcripts easier across YT.
        
         | cal85 wrote:
         | Hidden away yes, but it's amazing. It creates a totally new way
         | of consuming informational videos and everyone here should try
         | it. You can scroll through the transcription vertically and tap
         | on any bit and the video instantly jumps to that point -
         | basically the transcription is the new seek bar. And about
         | 1000x better at the job. No more skipping back to somewhere
         | roughly where you stopped paying attention and just letting it
         | play for a bit until you get back into the thread - now you can
         | jump around with surgical precision. It's like how you can
         | easily skim back and forth in a text article, but with a video.
         | It's a total game changer and I find it bizarre that it's so
         | hidden away so most people won't find it. It also works
         | particularly well when casting from your phone to a TV, using
         | the phone as the navigator. Oh and the transcriptions are about
         | 99% accurate, which is good enough for me.
        
           | iamflimflam1 wrote:
           | That's really interesting - on my own website I've extracted
           | the captions to my videos and I was thinking of wiring it up
           | so you could navigate the videos. I may actually get round to
           | doing this now.
        
       | jjice wrote:
       | Cool to see some Perl in a new repo. The thing I find most
       | appealing about Perl is their backticks for going out to the
       | shell. I know Ruby supports it too. I understand that this can be
       | a security issue but I find the quick shelling out so powerful
       | for a script that also needs to do some text processing or real
       | programming logic that the shell just isn't great for.
        
         | chefandy wrote:
         | Watch out for portability, too. Personally I would consider it
         | a last resort exclusively for local system automation too
         | complex for bash but for some reason python isn't available.
         | I'm not going to pretend I understand everyone else's use case
         | though so I'm glad it exists.
        
           | obrajesse wrote:
           | Author here: This was indeed a quick hack. And Perl is still
           | my fastest language for banging out a quick prototype. (I
           | used to be the Perl 5 project lead. I've spent a lot of time
           | with Perl.)
        
             | chefandy wrote:
             | And indeed, that's what Perl was built for!
        
       | riedel wrote:
       | I just had to write a research report for a funding agency with
       | many subprojects and could not get one input so I took a short
       | video from a pitch presentation and converted it first to
       | captions using spech2text and then to a research summary and it
       | was really impressive.
        
       | chocological wrote:
       | My friend and I made something similar a few years ago as a
       | college hackathon project - it features automatic scene
       | transition detection and a rough editor before publishing the
       | final results.
       | 
       | (The demo site is down, but you can clone the repo and run the
       | code locally)
       | 
       | https://gitlab.com/chocological00/bitcamp-2021
        
       | jve wrote:
       | Constantly my brain gets a question: Can I search specific
       | youtube video captions?
       | 
       | Ok, this may be an answer... but is there an online service that
       | given YT URL would spit captions out for me? Or maybe a browser
       | extension?
       | 
       | Maybe even youtube has a hidden link somwhere where I could see
       | all the text?
       | 
       | This submission triggered me for reasearch and found this gem:
       | https://filmot.com/
       | 
       | The guy who created it:
       | https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/oo8xbd/search_...
        
         | jshmrsn wrote:
         | There's a website designed for language learning from watching
         | YouTube captions with inline translations and dictionary
         | lookup. It also has support for searching videos by subtitle
         | content. But it has a limited index and isn't free for all
         | features. I thought its source was available but I can't find
         | it now... https://languageplayer.io/
        
         | samuelg123 wrote:
         | YouTube just added a feature to search transcripts. Seems like
         | I might be in an experiment though
        
         | prometheon1 wrote:
         | Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search - Search all of a channel
         | from the commandline
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36009774
        
         | adhvaryu wrote:
         | That's a good website you posted.
         | 
         | I encountered the "need" for this functionality a few years ago
         | to find the video of a YouTuber specifically saying something.
         | 
         | Back then I used a website that's actually specifically
         | dedicated to the YouTuber (Northernlion):
         | https://babypig.men/nlss-search?q=Basmati
         | 
         | I'm surprised the website is still live!
        
         | bilater wrote:
         | https://www.you-tldr.com/
        
         | kalleboo wrote:
         | On the YouTube website, if you click the "" button next to
         | share/clip/save, there is a "Show transcript" option and you
         | can use your browsers in-page search to search in it
        
           | kishmat wrote:
           | that's for specific vid, the site shared above lets you
           | search Indexing over 760 million captions across 687 million
           | videos and 52 million channels.
        
         | mmahemoff wrote:
         | Searching transcripts is really something YouTube itself should
         | be doing as part of just regular search (and fed into Google
         | search too). I have a feeling the regular search already does
         | it to some extent, as the system presumably is tagging videos
         | based on its caption extraction. However, that would only apply
         | to somewhat broad topics, not specific combinations of words
         | and the matching text is not surfaced in the UI.
        
         | twayt wrote:
         | Also try www.askYouTube.ai, not exactly pure text search but it
         | can help you find videos that answer your query using LLMs
        
           | jve wrote:
           | I wanted, but when I press ENTER, it asks to register... I
           | click cancel and notice PRICING page. I click on it and again
           | it asks for login. That is NOT how one onboards users.
        
       | bilater wrote:
       | Cool idea but it's still pretty minimal and hard to read. My tool
       | YOU-TLDR allows you to search through the transcript in your
       | language of choice side by side the video: https://www.you-
       | tldr.com/
        
       | Hakeemmidan wrote:
       | This is really cool, but why?
        
         | jimmygrapes wrote:
         | I can usually read 10 minutes of spoken content in less than 3
         | minutes. Accompanying video is often useless, unless there are
         | specific diagrams or illustrations/photos. I don't need to see
         | someone's face moving to absorb the info. Probably lots of
         | people out there with similar gripes.
        
         | robmccoll wrote:
         | I didn't create the tool, so I can't claim to know the author's
         | intentions. To me, this would be very useful in a variety of
         | circumstances:
         | 
         | - the 15 minute video containing 3 minutes of useful
         | information
         | 
         | - tutorials that you're trying to follow step-by-step that have
         | been tightly edited such that actually doing each step while
         | following along is impossible
         | 
         | - the video equivalent of listicles in which you're really only
         | interested in the list, not the padding
         | 
         | - quickly getting an idea of whether or not it's worth your
         | time to watch a lengthy video by quickly scrubbing through the
         | content
        
       | politelemon wrote:
       | If I'm remembering correctly the example they've used is the
       | first video uploaded to YouTube.
       | https://obra.github.io/Youtube2Webpage/example/
        
         | obrajesse wrote:
         | That's correct.
        
       | wahnfrieden wrote:
       | I'm working on adding this functionality to my iOS/macOS Japanese
       | reading app, Manabi Reader. However since my app is essentially a
       | web browser, it adds this functionality via userscripts instead
       | of "youtube-dl" which Apple doesn't like.
       | 
       | for future reference - https://reader.manabi.io
        
       | wackget wrote:
       | FYI this isn't AI-powered or anything. It's not even doing
       | speech-to-text synthesis. It just uses yt-dlp (youtube-dl) to
       | download the video with its existing [auto-generated] subtitles
       | from YouTube.
        
         | obrajesse wrote:
         | Yup! It's basically a glorified shell script. Sometimes the old
         | ways are useful.
         | 
         | (I'm the author)
        
       | bonyt wrote:
       | This is actually potentially helpful for me as a lawyer for
       | generating a paper record, and something I was talking about (and
       | meaning to write up a script for) the other day. Sometimes I want
       | to use a Youtube video in a court filing (for example, as prior
       | art in a patent case), and submitting a rough paper record of the
       | video like this is helpful along with the actual video.
        
       | nicd wrote:
       | It would be really neat if after pulling the captions, an LLM was
       | used to reword the content into an idiomatic "blogpost" (since
       | speech is typically different than writing). Using LLMs, we could
       | even choose the level of summarization and the output tone!
       | 
       | As someone who strongly prefers reading to watching instructional
       | videos, I'd pay for this service :)
        
         | jakear wrote:
         | I made something sorta like that specific to recipe videos.
         | Basically converts recipe into an idiomatic format (inlines
         | ingredients, detects and renders timers) and links each step in
         | the recipe to its timestamp in the video for easy indexing
         | while you're busy in the kitchen. (I spent too much time trying
         | to scrub to that one spot where "how it's supposed to look" is
         | shown while busy making it look that way)
         | 
         | See example: https://rexipie.com/watch?v=JiJXdoTjw8M
         | 
         | Just s/youtube/rexipie/ in any recipe video URL.
         | 
         | (full disclosure the step/transcript linking is paid-only as it
         | requires a GPT-4 call, everything else is available to demo on
         | free tier)
        
           | addandsubtract wrote:
           | This is neat! Do you plan to support videos containing
           | multiple recipes?
        
             | hyldmo wrote:
             | As a way too make that easier, maybe it would be nice to
             | support a user-specified set of timestamps? Say recipe A:
             | 0:00-7:46, recipe B: 7:47-15:33 and so on
        
           | Timon3 wrote:
           | That's really cool! For comparison, this is the recipe
           | written by the same guy: https://www.allrecipes.com/toy-box-
           | tomato-ricotta-cheese-tor...
           | 
           | I've gotta say, your website might be easier to use during
           | cooking, since it provides the information in-line
           | (especially serving sizes etc.)!
        
           | jonny_eh wrote:
           | The hyperlink "Food Wishes" at the top of the page is broken.
           | It'd be nice too if there was a way on that page to request a
           | new recipe (via video ID or whatever).
        
         | column wrote:
         | You can absolutely already do what you describe with GPT-4
         | plugins (Plus membership required). Using VoxScript and Video
         | Insight :
         | 
         | https://chat.openai.com/share/229e3ac8-3924-48e4-abd5-35bcb2...
        
           | Etrnl_President wrote:
           | Except for the complaining GPT will do, and some censorship
           | based on the whims of its' programming group. No thanks; I'll
           | stick to scripts, where the video dictates the content.
        
             | satvikpendem wrote:
             | Just use something like llama2-uncensored then, they're on
             | ollama.
        
           | micw wrote:
           | It seems that many of "my script can do [something] with
           | [information in a different form]" can be superseded by LLVMs
           | already or in the near future and the quality is way better
           | than what the scripts are capable of.
           | 
           | I just wonder what the price of this is. I can run most of
           | these scripts on an old laptop. But for the LLVM I need a
           | pricy an beefy computer or (even worse) a paid subscription
           | to a big tech's service.
        
           | jdthedisciple wrote:
           | Honestly, I like the GPT 3.5 version I posted here _way_
           | better.
        
         | evrimoztamur wrote:
         | I regularly use https://www.summarize.tech/ for this purpose.
         | 
         | Not exactly a blog post format, but it must've saved me a
         | hundred hours, no joke!
        
         | jdthedisciple wrote:
         | There you go, friend:
         | 
         |  _Step right up, folks! Gather around and feast your eyes on
         | the magnificent creatures before us - the elephants! Now, what
         | makes these majestic beings so fascinating, you ask? Well, let
         | me tell you - it 's all about their incredibly, unbelievably
         | long... um, trunks! Yes, you heard that right. These gentle
         | giants sport trunks that seem to stretch on for ages, and let
         | me tell you, it's nothing short of impressive. So, as we stand
         | here in awe of these marvelous creatures, remember, it's the
         | little (or should I say, not-so-little) things like their
         | remarkable trunks that make them truly stand out. And that, my
         | friends, wraps up the lowdown on our pachyderm pals -
         | fascinating trunks and all!_
        
         | mikeravkine wrote:
         | I've been working on just such a tool [1] to help me digest
         | podcasts and senate hearings.
         | 
         | [1] https://github.com/the-crypt-keeper/tldw
        
           | xenonite wrote:
           | Did you consider directly taking the subs from yt?
        
         | furkangok wrote:
         | can I self-promote here? we are not doing exactly the same but
         | we are transcribing videos ourselves (no auto YT captions) If
         | you want to read a high quality transcript & summarize videos,
         | you can do that at https://alphy.app
        
           | cookingrobot wrote:
           | This is a blank page on iOS Chrome.
        
         | Shrezzing wrote:
         | >since speech is typically different than writing
         | 
         | Is a scripted video significantly different to a written
         | blogpost? It might be a symptom of the type of YT videos I
         | watch, but most of them seem to be essay-style
         | "intro/thesis/points 1, 2, 3/counterpoint/conclusion", and the
         | only thing that hints at speech is the umming-and-arring of the
         | presenter.
        
           | tyingq wrote:
           | It is to me...an example from a CNN transcript:
           | 
           |  _" Former chief-of-staff, Mark Meadows asking a federal
           | judge to put his surrender on hold, while deciding whether to
           | move his trial to federal court, and former DOJ official
           | Jeffrey Clark, seeking the same, making a pretty remarkable
           | argument in his filing."_
           | 
           | That's someone doing a sort of play-by-play explanation of
           | what viewers are seeing in a video. Compare to a purposefully
           | written story:
           | 
           |  _" A federal judge in Georgia rejected a request by former
           | White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to postpone his
           | surrender and arrest in Fulton County, Georgia, as an attempt
           | to move the case to federal court is litigated, according to
           | a court order issued Wednesday."_
           | 
           | It seems like there could be some value in an LLM that would
           | rewrite the first into something more like the second.
        
         | zigzag312 wrote:
         | Or at least chunk transcription onto logical groups.
         | 
         | Chunking on the example webpage[1] is poor.
         | 
         | [1] https://obra.github.io/Youtube2Webpage/example/
        
       | causi wrote:
       | I wonder if AI is soon going to be able to pull off the
       | multimedia future I dreamed about as a kid, where no image is
       | just an image, no video is just a video, no text is just text.
        
       | hiccuphippo wrote:
       | Just last week I saw the opposite, a website that created videos
       | from blogposts: https://www.rephrase.ai/blog-to-video
       | 
       | While searching for its name I found several other services like
       | this.
        
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       (page generated 2023-08-31 23:02 UTC)