Taking notes from YouTube videos in Obsidian

before you can process notes you need to find a way to reliably get your notes or highlights on media that you consume into your note-taking tool in the first place I've already showed how I do this for books Kindle books in particular and for things like articles on the web but if you're watching this video then chances are high that you also have another source of media that we haven't talked about yet and that's videos on YouTube in this video I'm going to talk about how to take notes from YouTube videos I know it's a

little bit meta and then have them filtered On Through To obsidian the first way doesn't require any plugins at all and it is to open up obsidian on part of your screen and then YouTube on the other for example if I want to take notes on this video on performance testing using playwright I can quickly create a new node in obsidian for that and then I can start taking notes one interesting thing to note here though is that in obsidian you can actually embed whole web pages on YouTube videos it's a little bit different because

you don't want the entire web page or the comments on that you just want the video itself so on YouTube you can do that by clicking on share here and then you can click on this embed option and you're going to need to copy this entire thing so I'm going to copy that and then when I paste it here and I hit enter you'll see that what was a bunch of code is now an actual embed of this particular video on YouTube just an obsidian so if you don't want to have like half of the

screen taken up by YouTube and half of it by obsidian then you can do away with this entirely and just do it with an obsidian so you can start taking notes Here the problem with this is that the YouTube player isn't that great in obsidian this is okay for playing and you can scrub through it but you know it isn't fully featured so for example if you were halfway through watching something and then you go back into the code accidentally well you've now just lost your place so it's not exactly the most ideal way to

do things the second way to take notes on videos is by using the media extended obsidian plug-in so I already have the media extended plugin enabled and installed so I can just get started to do that I'm going to hit command P or control P to go to the command Pane and you can see that I already have a media extended command this comes with the plugin and you can also optionally set like a hotkey for it going to hit enter and I still have that link copied so I'm just going to paste that in

hit open and it actually already does the same thing that we were trying to do with this iframe so let me get rid of the iframe so that I can show you what media extended is like and now this is playing on its own and I didn't have to get the iframe and such it's also not going to go away so I find it a little bit more robust than you know accidentally going into the code from the iframe this is playing but while it's playing what if I want to take notes on a particular

moment well in media extended I can also get time stamp from player and you'll see that I already had previously saved this to have a hotkey of Ctrl T so I'm going to do that and you'll see that it already linked to that particular timestamp so apparently this is 45 minutes in yep that looks about right so then I can say John says something cool here and just to show you that hotkey I'm going to hit Ctrl T here and then you'll see that by default the timestamp is actually pasted after the cursor so you

type something here and then the timestamp is there so while you're watching the video you'll end up with a bunch of nodes that are timestamped The Annoying Thing with this one though is if you click on this it will open it up but it opens it up not in the obsidian browser here it'll open it up in your browser I've also seen that it doesn't always get the timestamp right like this one was supposed to be 56 minutes in but it took me right to the beginning again so it's not always been exactly spot on

one of the advantages of this media extended plugin is that it can handle more than just YouTube videos it can handle videos and also some audio notes as well and I don't think I've tried it with anything else but really I just need YouTube videos so for that particular workflow I haven't been using media extended erase recently I've been using another plugin called timestamp notes do you use timestamp notes I'm also going to use the command pane so Ctrl command P again and then type in timestamp notes you'll see that I have a few commands

here some of them have already established hotkeys for so the one that I actually want is open video player but that requires the URL to already be pasted so with media extended there was like a modal and I had to paste it in there but for timestamp notes I have to paste a link to the video there and then I can start it off with my hotkey command shift Y and that opens it up over here just make that a bit bigger so we can see it it's the same sort of idea except that this

one started it in the sidebar rather than as a different tab what this has actually done is it's embedded this link within a different code block you don't need to know exactly how it works is something that the plugin does and then after that while you're watching the video If you get to an interesting part then you can open up the command pane again and select the command for time stamping or you can just use the hotkey like I already have which was command control Z and now it has that time stamp there so let

me just type something over there the video is still going and you can keep watching it so here's one here I'll put another timestamp the cool thing about timestamp notes is once you've got the timestamps there these are actually buttons so if we go into them then you'll see that it is a special code block as well and when I click on it it actually goes to that part in the video but it doesn't open up a new browser it just does it in the sidebar which is really handy because while you're watching your notes

this is really a good way to scrub through a video if you've already taken notes on it so if I want to watch a video and take notes on it all entirely within obsidian then this is the plugin that I use timestamp notes but the fourth way it solves a problem that timestamp nodes said media extended didn't and that's that if you notice my notes were pretty short here and that's because while the video was playing I didn't really have much time I didn't want to miss anything so there wasn't a way to pause it

take notes and then keep playing again without you know doing a whole lot of back and forth so the next tool is not even an obsidian plug-in it's actually a Chrome browser extension and it's called Yi note I've actually been using e-node for almost two years that's longer than I've been using obsidian here's an article I wrote about how to use enote with ROM research that's how long I've been using it so here I am in Chrome I've got the same video up and I'm going to click on this little red icon here that is

e note this is also a free browser extension so the cool thing about enote is if I start playing this video let's say I'm a little further along then I'm going to type here open MCT C open MCT in action you'll notice that when I started typing the video automatically paused for me the browser extension did that and that's really handy because usually when I want to take notes on something I want to have the time to really flesh something out before I go back so I'll save that one then I will take a few

more notes and I'll say this is devtools performance panel and I'll save that as well this is a recent thing that they started doing this is a little bit annoying go back down here start playing it again and I'll type K probabilities dot spec dot JS so I just want to take a few notes here so that I have something to demonstrate later what is client-side performance now let's say that I'm done with this video I've watched everything I've taken four notes they are also time stamped so I will be able to see that later

as well and now that I'm done I can can go to this open management page and you'll see all of the videos that I've recently taken video notes on and this one is the one that I was just doing performance testing using playwright so then I can go into that and this is really cool because it presents me with this view where I see a screenshot of the video as it was playing and then my notes and the Times tab so then if I click on the timestamp it'll take me to that moment of the

video so if I scroll up here I can select a circle and then I'll say that this particular paragraph is the one that I wanted to highlight so that's kind of interesting and I'll click save there and then I have a bunch of options here I can use it to export to PDF but of course since I want this to go to obsidian I'm going to choose the one that says export as markdown I'm going to click on that and then I will just save it in my obsidian adult you'll see that it's saved as

a DOT MD found because I saved it right to My Vault I'm going to switch tabs to here and then I'll open up that particular note open it up side by side so you can compare it to the timestamp notes note so it looks very similar it has the timestamps here and it also has my actual notes here but clicking on it will take me to that point in the video in the browser not in obsidian so you know it's not exactly as handy as timestamp notes and because I exported as markdown not PDF I

don't get those annotations in the screenshots in obsidian so what's not so great about this browser extension is that I still had to manually export to markdown ideally I would just click a button or something and it would maybe go to read wise I did think about forking the code myself since it's open source and connecting it to read wise but then read wise came up with a better option option number five is read wise reader reader has recently gone into public beta so if you were wanting to test it out before now's your chance

because you just have to go and sign up for average you don't have to go on a waitlist like you used to anymore and reader just announced an integration with YouTube so let's take a look at that now I've already talked quite a bit about read wise readers so just check out that link to get the full Lowdown on how to use reader but right now I've just got the video up and normally If This Were an article I would just click on this yellow reader icon and that's the same thing that I'm going to

do now obviously there isn't anything to highlight but it'll still say that it's saved to reader now to go to reader itself and there's the video from YouTube I'm going to go into that and you'll notice that reader has a very different approach from any of the other plugins or tools that I've talked about instead of trying to timestamp it to the video it just leverages the fact that YouTube already creates automatic captions and so that's what it's showing you here we can still play the video here and you can then see as you're watching

the video the words that the person is saying get highlighted which incidentally is pretty awesome for language learning as well although I've only tried this with English so far but you can also just pause that and if you would prefer to read it or maybe you already watched it but then you just want to be able to highlight some things in the text version then you can use all the usual reader shortcuts so if you wanted to highlight this entire paragraph you can hit H and the entire thing is highlighted but if you just wanted

like a part of it so maybe just that part then that's fine too and then I can also add a note I've saved that and then I'll just add another one here as well because it's already in read wise reader and there is already a read-wise official obsidian plug-in that I have then I just have to either wait for that plugin to sync I think I've got it set up to do it every hour or I can just manually sync it and see what it looks like in obsidian which is what I'm going to do

right now in obsidian I'm going to the read wise official plugin settings and then there's an initiate sync so see how it automatically resyncs every hour but I don't want to wait I want to show you right away so I'm just waiting for that to sync all right read why Sync has been completed now let's see what it looks like so performance testing using playwright and it's under Articles so I'm going to open that up and I'll put it side by side so you can compare it a little bit with the others so this one

was younote on the left and now on the right this is what read wise brought in so the advantage of this is that it has all of the metadata data that read wise usually brings in all of which is customizable by the way these are things that I put for how I like to do things they're still the URL here so you can still go to the YouTube video but the highlights here are going to be the text highlights so the disadvantage of this read-wise approach is that it's text only so if you were hoping

to like get a timestamp to the exact moment where you took that highlight then you're not going to be able to do that at least not right now but in most cases I find myself using read wise reader anyway after I've already watched the video so I watched the video and then as a note to myself to maybe investigate further I might share it to reader if I'm on my mobile or I can just click on the browser extension like I showed you if I'm on my laptop another thing that makes read by such a

compelling choice for taking notes on videos is that they're pretty quick to jump on the latest trend of cool things that have come out for example they did like an experiment on bionic reading and recently they announced that they're jumping on the whole AI terrain that is all the craze these days but their implementation is actually useful and it's called ghost reader for example this is that video that's in read wise reader still I'm going to hit command K to open up their command pane so it's command or control p in obsidian but Commander control

K in reader and I'm going to type ghost reader and there is a keyboard shortcut for invoking ghost reader it's shift G so after you invoke it then you need to decide what you wanted to do this time I'm going to say summarize the document and you'll see that little ghost in the corner there and then it'll say GPT added to highlight then when you go to notebook here you'll have your highlights but then also there's this nice little summary it says playwright as a node.js library that enables developers to create automated tests of web

applications this is actually pretty good I have no idea how it actually does it especially since the captions weren't that great this is just the automated Google captions and yet it was able to do a pretty good job with the summary so that's the summary let's try something else like generate thought-provoking questions again it'll say GPT is added to the document note and when we scroll up it has some good questions to ask yourself while you're watching a YouTube video like what are the advantages of using playwright what challenges do I need to be aware

of and what resources are available these are actually pretty legitimate questions this is a more technical one here's another type of video this one is by zoltvitzian Who is the the developer of the obsidian Excalibur and excaliburing plugins and this is one about his book on a page for the visual thinking Workshop cohort that I recently joined and I'm going to enable ghost reader here I will also ask it to summarize the document and then maybe I'll generate q a pairs based on my highlights let's see what it does so it does come up with

a summary here emergence is a book about the power of complexity in our lives and the world around us but I see that my attempt to create question and answer pairs have resulted in this error take some highlights and try this prompt again so let's just go down and take some highlights here so now I have highlights there here as well and then I'm going to do shift G and then generate q a pairs again so it looks like despite the highlights I wasn't able to make the Q a pairs work let's see if I

can do some of the other ones it's like generate thought-provoking questions okay that worked well what is the definition of emergence what are the key ideas and themes discussed in the book those are pretty good I would also want to try the ask the document a question this is going to be really difficult I don't know how well it's going to do but let me try anyway what does it mean to be self-organizing ghost reader is an AI reading tool that works best when the user asks a specific targeted question okay so this is really

good because instead of just saying sorry don't know it actually asks a better question that it might be able to answer so let's try that what are the three elements of self-organization outlined in the text ghost reader says critical mass so that it can make intelligent assessments High number of Random Encounters and identifying patterns in the science okay well that's actually pretty good in this way you can use read wise reader as a bit of a short form for videos if you don't know short form it's like a service that you can use to quickly

screen out books that you don't want to read you get summaries but also nuanced commentary on books that help deepen your understanding of even the books that you choose to read and also help you weed out the books that maybe aren't really worth the effort to read so I kind of look at read wise reader as a way to do this same with YouTube videos I mean you don't really have to watch the entire thing to already be able to ask it to summarize things this doesn't necessarily even have to make it to your obsidian

Vault so those are five different ways that you can take notes on YouTube videos in obsidian which ones do I use I still kind of use three of them depending on the circumstance when I'm on my laptop I usually have an external monitor so I'm not hurting for screen real estate so I it doesn't matter if I have to have this side pain and in that case I use timestamp notes because I can also use keyboard shortcuts and be able to take notes while I'm watching the video but if I'm on my mobile or on

my tablet maybe I usually just send it to reader and worry about it later I kind of use it as a watch it later service the read wise is usually called a read it later service but sometimes I can get really lost in a YouTube rabbit hole if I'm not careful so I just use that as a way to like send it off and then not have to watch it right then and there and then I also really like that I have the text there which means that it's infinitely more searchable so I am finding

myself gravitating towards the read wise reader option it's only been out for I think about two weeks and I'm thinking that that probably will be the most commonly used option for me in the future but I'm imagining that there are some things that it's not going to get right not every video on YouTube has captions and not every video that has captions has usable captions it's one of the reasons why I actually pay to get my videos captioned so that it can be translated into other languages but I'm thinking that if I come across something

like that then I might still use something like you know to take my notes it seems like it wasn't so long ago that everything on YouTube was like a cat video or a compilation of golden buzzer moments or something I mean there's still that corner of YouTube but I actually find myself on YouTube more and more to really learn YouTube has become one of my primary ways to learn about science travel software engineering so having a way to extend the learning and bring some of those insights from let's face that otherwise mindless YouTube binges over

into my personal Knowledge Management System is essential for me if you'd like to know more about read wise reader check out this video that I did just after it was launched more features have been added to it since then like for example being able to take notes from YouTube videos but the basics are the same thanks for watching agoresto in Portugal