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Show HN: Take timestamped notes while watching YouTube videos

annotate.tv

154 pointsmatiastucci61 comments

For the Emacs nerds among us, you can hack something similar together: when you start the video, also start a timer running in Emacs org-mode with `org-timer-start` (`C-c C-x 0`) You can then insert timestamped notes with `C-c C-x -`, and once you've got a timestamp note, you can hit `M-RET` to insert a new one with a new timestamp.

thanks for the tip! it's a little less user friendly though haha

Thank you, I just started using org-mode today.

oh welcome to the first day of the rest of your life emacs and org-mode are an investment that will pay dividends in your productivity for the rest of your life

That's a great tip in general, but I assume the biggest benefit here really is being able to pause, rewind and seek around while staying in sync, which would be much harder for some external timer.

Oh for sure. Though, it would not surprise me if someone has come up with some way to control video playback through Emacs.

EMMS[1] might be part of the solution

[1] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EMMS

Relatedly, if you want to skim videos to find relevant/interesting parts, this is incredibly useful: https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed

this is great. Thanks!

This is so much better than me doing right click > inspect element > `$0.playbackRate = 1.75`

That being said, Youtube itself is pretty good at this, with the shift+> hotkey, and the recent addition of 1.75 which is the sweet spot for me.

EDIT: What I fantastic extension, has all the options I could want (exclusion list, custom hotkeys, hide by default, etc).

I have definitely been told by people that sharing this with them has significantly improved their quality of life, so I share it any chance I get. It's especially handy that it works with almost all online videos. (I have no affiliation, just a huge fan)

In fact, writing this comment inspired me to submit it as it's own top level post on HN.

The "Use example video" walk-through does not permit simply clicking through the demo. On the "This is the section where you are going to write your annotations." div, when you click the bottom next-arrow to proceed, it insists "Please, write a title and/or a body".

Users wishing to quickly "scroll" through the demo, are thus prevented from using that style of perusal. Some will punt. Perhaps this is an intentional tradeoff, sacrificing some, to increase engagement of others? It might be interesting to A/B test that. Perhaps the "user provides video url" and "use example video" cases might be handled differently? Perhaps a "Continue with worked example? y/n" instead of the error, to still nudge towards engagement, but with a lower barrier to "I just want to see your thing - why are you stopping me?"?

The reason I am doing that is because there is some UI that appears _after_ you start typing in the input/text area. So I can't show the walkthrough until you do that. You can always just close the tour and interact with the page.

I'll think on how to avoid that though. Thanks for the feedback!

Pre-filling those fields, with the body text auto-selected may be a good compromise.

you're right. Thank you!

niiiiiiiiice... i think this is something that alot of schools could use since everything is going online.

i'm going to echo @rkhassen9 observation that your pricing model isn't attractive to the average person. this is totally my opinion, but the value here is the amount of notes you collect. while the average person is not willing to pay to record note, businesses are definitely willing to pay to retrieve the notes of others. if you let people annotate an unlimited number of votes with an unlimited number of notes you will build your database faster. then you could charge businesses to have access to those notes via an API. on a consumer side of that, individuals could see all of their notes but can only see the last 5 recent notes for others.

all in all though, this is a really cool product and will definitely be a game changer as more and more schools and classes move to online.

yeah, I totally agree. Definitely this business model it's not great. I still need to think it more. Thanks for the feedback :)

I'm trying to understand why businesses would pay for these notes. The only things that come to mind are research/AI purposes-- essentially having a dataset to feed into marketing or market-research efforts? Maybe someone can enlighten me.

businesses pay HUGE money for focus groups and A/B testing. think of the notes as detailed points of these. not to mention a wider and honest sample pool.

also... this is great way for businesses to find out more about their competitors.

Would you be able to pull the transcript from YouTube for editing/commenting? That would be really useful for me.

In the future it would be great to have these notes sync/push to RoamResearch

Yeah, I have that in my backlog. I still need to take a look and see how hard it is. Thanks for the feedback!

That was my initial thoughts too.

Basically show the subtitles as it's going along (last 10-20 seconds), and allow a user to copy/paste text or instantly grab sentences.

You can do this now using Hypothesis at docdrop.org-- just pick a youtube video and add URL.

didn't know about docdrop, I thought it was similar to Annotate.tv but I got: "Our video annotation capability works for YouTube videos that have either human or machine-generated transcripts.". That's not a requisite on Annotate.

You need to choose a YT video that has a auto-generated transcript. About 80%+ videos do I think. Choose another one. Docdrop+Hypothesis only works on transcripts-- it's not a timecode video annotator.

yeah, I just tried it. It's pretty good!

> In the future it would be great to have these notes sync/push to RoamResearch

Or, an open-source alternative like Zettlr, Logseq, or Athens (coming soon): https://github.com/athensresearch/athens

In general, we shouldn't let expensive paid software like Roam leech value from plugins made by volunteers!

People are going to build for the tools that have strong network effects. Those Roam clones you mention have none at the present moment.

And I don't see how a Roam Research integration would be "leeching value," especially because it will eventually be possible to build paid plugins for Roam, which opens the revenue door for devs building plugins.

I've been listening to podcasts on YouTube, running RoamNER [0] on the transcript, and inputting the result into Roam.

[0] https://github.com/hmprt/RoamNER

Feedback: The "Cancel" and "Create" buttons are too close to each other. If you accidentally click on the "Cancel" button you lose your entire note. Perhaps move the cancel button to a less prominent position and add a confirmation dialog box.

Makes sense. Thank you for the feedback!

Why is there a Cancel button at all?

And I've stopped commenting on Youtube because a single Tab-Return hits the Cancel button. You have to remember to Tab-Tab-Return to hit the Comment button. It's like it was designed to loose comments!

My favorite is when the ‘next-video’ timer decides you weren’t leaving a comment and sends you to a new page. Of course the comment is lost when you go back.

because you can edit a note, if you cancel then you will create a one. I'll fix the tab issue. Thanks for the feedback!

Interesting to see this.

A couple months ago I launched a site (https://familymemorystream.com/) that allows annotating videos but is targeted towards the niche of converted family videos.

I was considering opening it up to make a generic "video note taker" version; it looks like you beat me to it :) Best wishes! It will be interesting to see where you end up with the pricing model. It looks like you're using YouTube/Vimeo for the video hosting so that frees you up to do one-time purchases if you want since your server costs will likely stay fairly constant across scale.

that looks great. Yeah, I'm still figuring out the business model. I think a one time purchase is probably what I'm going to do. BTW, after launching it in Product Hunt I saw a few similar ideas too :)

You could probably sell subscriptions to you-tubers who want to annotate videos on their channels. I am sure they would find a way to do cool things with it.

yeah, I think I'll make a list of a couple YouTube channels I like and reach to them

One of my users pointed out that it would be nice to have a fully off-line capable app. There are a couple barriers to this:

- It would require users to have a p2p system set up to get the video onto their system, which is a configuration barrier for most users.

- It's not clear what the monetization strategy would be to fund the development of the app.

- It would require a large amount of device storage to hold the videos.

But if someone were able to figure those out, they might be able to differentiate from the similar products.

offline would be great, but yeah... I think that is going to be hard and expensive, like you said

This has a nice UI, well done on launching! I made something similar but never really thought of monitising it. The focus was on the tagging/annotating for power users with keyboard shortcuts: https://tagx.io

oh, this looks great!

Great to see, here's a YouTube chrome extension I made that shows the timestamp comments publicly

https://raven-points.herokuapp.com/

that looks great! I made an extension too, but to add videos to my app with one click: https://youtu.be/MiiKrvxSNbo

I love it.

At the same time, I would never buy it unless I was somehow earning residual income by having it.

SASS pricing not a good model for the average consumer due to the way costs accrue.

If there as a free tier for unlimited personal usage or a one time reasonable fee for unlimited personal usage, I’d probably jump on this. (If I’m going to bother to use a tool, I want a level that I can use on all my personal projects - the model of a few for free is just a waste of time for me) And then a paid tier for people want to use it professionally - eg sharing permissions etc.

Otherwise, awesome tool!

yeah, I didn't implement payments yet because I'm not sure about the model. Maybe a one time price makes sense... it sucks that I just launched on ProductHunt, maybe it would have been a good strategy to launch having that in mind. Thanks for the feedback!

Awesome response! Companies that “hear” their audiences, are top notch in my book.

I like the accessibility and non-intrusive nature of extensions sometimes and was happy to discover Rumin.

I've been going berserk since last week with a custom hack on top of Rumin (https://github.com/jhlyeung/rumin-web-clipper) that was recently posted on HN.

Rumin discussion at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24461070

Very cool, this is actually somewhat related to what I'm working on at topica.io - let me know once you dive into interactive transcripts / search :)

that looks cool! Ok, will do

The wysiwyg is hidden below the keyboard on mobile. Which kind of defeats the purpose of being able to take time stamped notes.

oh, good to know. I still didn't optimize it 100% on mobile. Thanks for letting me know

This is a great tool. The one thing I need before I would start regularly using it: Hot keys

Hot keys to: P0. Submit the notes (and start notes at a new timestamp) P0. Start taking a new note P2. Pause/play the video

wow I built something exactly like this before and was thinking of making into a saas. good work and good luck

I've been thinking about building something like this, but as an extension. Essentially allowing to leave notes on Youtube videos directly.

Any plans for a Vimeo equivalent?

yeah, I have it on my backlog. Should be easy because the player I'm using already supports Vimeo too. I'll implement it in the next days

Thanks!

Cool UI! What stack did you use?

thanks! I'm using Next.js and ant.design for the UI

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