Ask HN: Tools for taking notes on videos? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Tools for taking notes on videos?

8 pointsrpandey12344 comments

What software exists for taking notes on videos? (e.g. lectures, political speeches, video games, or even music videos.) Having a clean and easy way to annotate video content according to timestamp would have lots of educational value. I've found these two sites which seem to do the job, but they seem clunky or non-intuitive:

http://www.videonot.es/ https://ant2.cehd.umn.edu/

Can anyone suggest other options?

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If I was faced with your problem, I'd solve it in an odd way which might not be what you want.

I'd use subtitles.

With a bit of ffmpeg magic, I'd get the video file into MKV (Matroska) format simply because I like them best and I find them easiest to edit. The important piece is MKV supports embedding subtitle text into the video container format as a separate "stream" (read:file). It's easy to add or remove subtitles.

The next problem is timing your text to specific parts of the video, but this problem has mostly been solved by the fansub crowd. There are a few different open and closed source subtitling programs out there. I have no experience with them, so I can't make any suggestions. If I needed a solid suggestion, I'd ask any of the fansub groups. They'd know what works well.

In most regards, what you want is the subtitling software itself since it allows you to both view the video and edit your text. If your text is simple, it should do the trick.

EDIT: If you have the urge to do some hacking, you could also modify a player like VLC or mplayer to show text in a separate window from the video. This could help if you need to present your additions to others.

Are you answering the same question OP asks though? By definition, "notes" are your personal summary/questions/ideas about what's being presented. Your notes might refer to the words in the presentation, or the video, or pictures, or the music, or just random ideas that come to you. Subtitles are not that - subtitles are the original text in its entirety. So I guess I don't see how subtitles == notes.

Subtitles are just text data with a time code corresponding to a point in the video, so the feature of "subtitles" can be used to store whatever text you want, including notes, even though keeping notes was not the intent of the feature. There is nothing requiring the text data to be either an exact transcription or translation of the audio data. In fact, some fansub groups have released "joke" or "troll" translations for fun on various anime videos.

Once you generate your subtitle text file, you can easily merge it into the video file. There are a few different subtitle text formats but the only one I've really worked with is SSA/ASS.

The MKV video container format allows you to store multiple "streams" (files) of ASCII or UTF-8 text synced by time codes to the video. The reason for multiple subtitle streams is so one video (container) file can have subtitles in multiple languages. This means if there's some hard limit (I'm not sure if there is) on the amount of text you can have at a single time code, you can get around the problem by adding another stream/file.

I prefer the old standard of pen and paper for two good reasons:

1. I hate typing.

2. Handwriting aids retention more than typing.[1]

[1] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110119095458.ht...

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