[HN Gopher] Show HN: VideoGist - Useful YouTube video summaries
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       Show HN: VideoGist - Useful YouTube video summaries
        
       Hi all! I put together a website that summarizes youtube videos.
       Enter any YouTube URL, and it will give you an overall summary,
       individual chapter summaries, along with key video frames.  Here
       are a few examples:  https://www.videogist.co/videos/tips-for-
       technical-startup-f...  https://www.videogist.co/videos/openai-
       devday-opening-keynot...  https://www.videogist.co/videos/cbs-
       evening-news-full-episod...  https://www.videogist.co/videos/the-
       best-easy-miso-salmon-re...  I'd love to hear feedback - if it's
       useful (or not!), what could be improved, etc. Thanks for taking a
       look!  p.s. it can take a few seconds for summary content to show
       up - I am working to speed it up
        
       Author : nliang86
       Score  : 41 points
       Date   : 2023-12-07 12:30 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.videogist.co)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.videogist.co)
        
       | skeptrune wrote:
       | Hilarious to see a Legion of Skanks video in the immediate
       | history list.
       | 
       | But it was surprisingly useful. The screen grabs throughout the
       | summary were especially nice.
       | 
       | I'd like it if I could jump to the specific timestamp a summary
       | relates to on YouTube itself from the gen'ed text.
       | 
       | Thinking about it more though I'd almost rather this backfill
       | breakpoints in podcasts I listen to and let me jump to them.
       | 
       | I also wouldn't worry about perf too much. I'd be ok with waiting
       | on the order of minutes to get a quality improvement.
       | 
       | Final nit, the tone of the LLM being used sucks. Maybe try a
       | different one or give the user options with open router?
        
       | Jayakumark wrote:
       | The cooking one looks spot-on, is it using GPT4 and transcript or
       | with Vision ?
        
       | w-m wrote:
       | Picked one from my recent history:
       | https://www.videogist.co/videos/10-things-you-didn-t-know-ab...
       | 
       | The text summary is very, very good. Kudos!
       | 
       | (As a nitpick, it has 'Wesan' instead of 'Wunderschon', but David
       | himself doesn't pronounce it very clearly, so can't really blame
       | the speech recognition there.)
       | 
       | The frame grabs next to the text appear to be sampled at random
       | times, and not for their content. In the video, David presents
       | screenshots and photos and what not. It happens to work out for
       | Chapter 4, 6 and 7. In 5 of the other chapters it shows just the
       | talking head. If a human had picked them, I think they'd show the
       | most relevant imagery for the particular part of the video, and
       | not the talking head.
        
       | freetonik wrote:
       | Very cool! Curious about the technical details of the LLM side.
       | Can't imagine this is cheap to run.
       | 
       | Tiny suggestion: the timestamp in the generated text block could
       | link to the corresponding timestamp in the video.
        
         | evanreichard wrote:
         | I have a similar (less polished) side project I threw together
         | in a weekend [0][1]. I use ChatGPT's API and it costs ~0.5c /
         | article generated. So IMO very reasonable.
         | 
         | [0]
         | https://gitea.va.reichard.io/evan/VReader/src/branch/master/...
         | 
         | [1] https://vreader.va.reichard.io/
        
         | klaussilveira wrote:
         | It depends. If it is using YouTube's transcript API, it
         | shouldn't be that bad. The problem with that is that it tends
         | to mess up when there are multiple people in the video.
        
           | __jonas wrote:
           | Wouldn't the expensive part of this be the LLM summary, not
           | the video transcription? I can do transcription pretty easily
           | with my low end graphics card and a fast version of whisper.
           | 
           | I was wondering though, if this uses the YouTube transcript
           | if available, and falls back to do the transcription itself
           | if not.
        
       | phantomathkg wrote:
       | Has it been HN-ed? WheN I tried to summarised a video I got
       | "We're sorry, but something went wrong. If you are the
       | application owner check the logs for more information."?
        
         | nliang86 wrote:
         | Apologies - I didn't anticipate hitting rate limits on a third
         | party service so quickly. I was able to get them increased -
         | try again?
        
       | yaman12 wrote:
       | The summary text is descriptive and accurate (so far, need to
       | test more). Thumbnails for each segment could be better--less
       | repetitive, eyes open, etc. But overall as good or better than
       | what I've seen from commercial video mam vendors over the last 20
       | years.
        
       | otterpro wrote:
       | This is nice! One thing that bothers me is the web page's Title
       | which is "VideoGist". I'd appreciate it if it could be named
       | "VideoGist - <youtube video title>" or something like that.
        
         | nliang86 wrote:
         | Noted! Will get this out tonight.
        
       | mdrzn wrote:
       | There's plenty of websites like this one, but I really like this
       | one. Saved in the bookmarks.
       | 
       | Good summary and great breakdown with timestamps, would be even
       | better if they were clickable.
        
       | __jonas wrote:
       | I got an error with this video:
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uf-kDNFMCD0
       | 
       | https://www.videogist.co/videos/panasonic-s-rapid-response-t...
       | 
       | Or maybe it's still pending? I don't really understand if I'm
       | supposed to refresh the page or if it will update automatically
       | when processing has finished, so I hit refresh and got this error
       | instead of the loading page:                 We're sorry, but
       | something went wrong.            If you are the application owner
       | check the logs for more information.
        
         | nliang86 wrote:
         | Apologies - I am hitting a rate limit on a third party service.
         | Working on it now.
        
           | nliang86 wrote:
           | I (think) I was able to get a rate limit increase. Try again?
        
       | lucgagan wrote:
       | Very cool. I've been using a similar approach to summarize videos
       | on my website https://ray.run/videos/112-playwright-
       | installation-2022 Doesn't cost much and getting great feedback
       | about it.
        
       | cloudking wrote:
       | Kudos for the landing page, this is how AI products should be
       | presented.
       | 
       | 1) Direct access to the product
       | 
       | 2) Multiple demo examples
       | 
       | I've seen so many launches here recently that have no demos,
       | require sign up and basically gate all the usefulness of the
       | product behind walls.
        
       | ggambetta wrote:
       | This is great. I asked it to summarize my showreel (which I
       | understand is not the kind of video you want to summarize) and
       | the results are both surprisingly accurate and hilarious. Well
       | done :)
        
       | adocomplete wrote:
       | Very cool. We have something similar at https://videotap.com,
       | although a bit more focused on repurposing your video content
       | into other mediums (written blogs, twitter threads, etc.)
        
         | nliang86 wrote:
         | That is an awesome use case!
        
       | HansardExpert wrote:
       | First I get an UNKNOWN ISSUER from Firefox as a security warning,
       | if I bypass that I get.
       | 
       | Then my corp network reports
       | 
       | FortiGuard Intrusion Prevention - Access Blocked Web Page Blocked
       | 
       | You have tried to access a web page that is in violation of your
       | Internet usage policy. Category Newly Observed Domain URL
       | https://www.videogist.co/
       | 
       | :/
        
         | nliang86 wrote:
         | It might be due to the .co endpoint and your corporate policy?
         | AFAICT the SSL cert, etc. is g2g - let me know if there's
         | anything I missed though!
        
       | Valk3_ wrote:
       | Great work! I got a question though, what's the processing time
       | for longer videos? Like lecture videos that usually are somewhere
       | around 1h-2h? Can it handle longer vids reasonably fast?
        
         | nliang86 wrote:
         | Should be in the ballpark of 30s to 1 minute. You should start
         | seeing earlier parts of the summary faster than that though (<
         | 10s). I am also working on improving chapter summary quality
         | for long videos - sometimes too much content gets rolled into a
         | single chapter.
        
       | ElijahLynn wrote:
       | Nice!
       | 
       | Feedback - linking to the timestamped sections was the first
       | thing I tried to do on your examples.
        
         | nliang86 wrote:
         | Do you mean from a video playback perspective, or something
         | different?
        
           | ElijahLynn wrote:
           | I mean that if I find a summary section useful, I might want
           | to watch the video clip around that point in time. So being
           | able to click a link to go to YT to watch it at that point in
           | time or even better, embed the video with that timestamp
           | instead of the image, then I can just click play instead of
           | see the image.
           | 
           | Thanks
        
       | ElijahLynn wrote:
       | Feedback: Browser Extension would be much more useful in
       | practice. I usually end up at a video, and THEN want the summary.
        
         | nliang86 wrote:
         | Great feedback - I will look into what it would take to make a
         | browser extension client.
        
           | ElijahLynn wrote:
           | Thanks!
        
       | mig39 wrote:
       | Is the service hugged to death? I've tried it on a couple of
       | videos, and it's stuck on "Loading content" ...
        
         | nliang86 wrote:
         | Apologies - the app was hitting a rate limit on a third party
         | API which I think I just resolved.
        
       | khaitroy wrote:
       | I love it. I never tried any summary website but it's phenomenal.
       | What technology do you use?
        
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       (page generated 2023-12-07 23:02 UTC)