5 Effective Methods to Take 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 shown 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 and 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 note and 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 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 plugin 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 a plug-in 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 ey frame so let me get

rid of the ey frame 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 if frame 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 timestamp from

player and you'll see that I already had previously saved this to have a hot key of control T so I'm going to do that and

you'll see that it already linked to that particular time samp 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

contrl 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 Tim stamp is there so while you're watching the video you'll end up with a bunch of notes 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 browser here it'll open it up in your browser I've also seen that it doesn't always get the

time stamp 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 plug-in 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

recently I've been using another plug-in called timestamp notes to use time stamp notes I'm also going to use the command

pane so control command P again and then type in timestamp notes you'll see that I have a few commands here some of them

I've already established hot keys 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 modu and I had to paste it in there but for time stamp

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 so 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 plug-in 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 paint again and

select the command for timestamping or you can just use the hotkey like I already have which was command control Z

and now it has that Tim 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 Tim stamp 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 doesn't open up a

new browser it just does it in the sidebar which is really handy cuz 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 video and take

notes on it all entirely within obsidian then this is the plug-in that I use timestamp notes but the Fourth Way

solves a problem that time stamp notes and 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

yote I've actually been using yote for almost 2 years that's longer than I've been using obsidian here's an article I

wrote about how to use eote with Rome 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 yote this is also a free browser extension so

the cool thing about you note 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 see 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 Dev tools 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

capabilities. spc. 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 timestamped so I will be able to see that later as well and now that I'm done I 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

timestamp so then if I click on the Tim stamp 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 Vault you'll see that it's saved as a MD file 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 I'll 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 and the screenshots in obsidian so what's not so great about this browser extension is that I still

had to manually export to mark down ideally I would just click a button or something and it would maybe go to

readwise I did think about forking the code myself since it's open source and connecting it to readwise but then

readwise came up with a better option option number five is readwise reader reader has recently gone into public

beta so if you were wanting to test it out before now is your chance because you just have to go and sign up for it

you don't have to go on a weight list 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 readwise reader 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 readwise reader and there is already a readwise official obsidian plugin that I have then I just

have to either wait for that plugin to syn 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 wi official plug-in 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 readwise Sync has been

completed now let's see what it looks like so performance testing using play right 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 compare it a little bit with the others so this

one was eote on the left and now on the right this is what Reed wise brought in so the advantage of this is that it has

all of the metadata that readwise 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 are 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 readwise 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 readwise reader anyway

after I've already watched the video so I watch the video and then as a not 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 rewi 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 train 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 readwise 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 want it 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 and then when you go to notebook here you'll have your highlights but then also there's this

nice little summary it says playwright is a no. JS library that enables developers to create automated tests of

web applications this is actually pretty good have no idea how it actually does it um 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 gpts 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 playright 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 Z vitan who is the de developer of the obsidian excal draw and excal brain

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 attempts to create question and answer

pairs have resulted in this eror 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 like generate thought-provoking questions okay that worked well what is

a 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 no 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 signs okay

well that's actually pretty good in this way you can use readwise 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 readwise reader as a way to do the 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 now readwise is usually called a readit 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 readwise reader

option it's only been out for I think about 2 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 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 readwise 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