[modeless]

1. In a desktop web browser, visit a YouTube video with captions, which is almost all of them

2. Click the video description to expand it

3. Scroll down and click the tiny "Show Transcript" button near the bottom (whoever decided to bury it down here was very misguided)

4. Ctrl-F and search any word. Occurrences in the transcript will be highlighted and you can press enter to scroll the transcript to the next one. Click the transcript to seek the video.

I see that this extension shows occurrences on the seek bar which is cool. There is also a slight problem with regular ctrl-F: if you search for a multiple word phrase you might not find it if the phrase happened to be split between two chunks of the transcript. So that could be better in this extension. And of course not every YouTube video has captions, but most do these days.

[philsnow]

> visit a YouTube video with captions, which is almost all of them

Depending on what you're watching, you might never come across a video with good subtitles but rather Youtube's auto-generated subtitles.

Whisper can do a better job in a lot of cases, but not all... I wonder if they've had multiple generations of auto-captioning and not gone back and redone the ones that were done earlier.

This extension is really interesting to me because in the past I've tried (and failed) to make a similar one that adds a new .vtt to the list of available subtitles for the video. I sometimes struggle with auditory processing, especially in a noisy environment, and following along with subtitles helps me out immensely, so it's frustrating when the auto-generated subtitles are poor quality. I've bookmarked the extension to see if I can fork it for that purpose in the future.

[thaumasiotes]

> Depending on what you're watching, you might never come across a video with good subtitles but rather Youtube's auto-generated subtitles.

Even with very little correspondence to the actual dialogue, if you already know what you're looking for, you can probably find it pretty easily in the auto-generated subtitles.

ctrl+F won't work in that case, but reading will.

[ewild]

if you have any questions feel free to ask!

[ewild]

you are correct, originally youtube didnt have this when i made it in 2019 with deepspeech, now they do but i just always preferred the idea of it being on the timebar to just click and go right to it. tbh i should just make a simple addon to take the youtube timestamps and slap it onto the timebar. also for the split chunks this would have no problem there as the transcript is actually stored in a json file, so any concurrent words will always be matchable for phrases. ofc downside being you need to run the model lol

[modeless]

I'd use an extension that made the transcript show by default on every video and added a transcript search bar in the page. That would be great.

[ewild]

i guess i might aswell do it so i dont need to run a model everytime myself too lol ill have it done in a day or two

[stevenicr]

If that also saved a copy of the transcript, with meta data added (title, channel, url, smilar vids) - as a text file on my local machine - I would actually use this as well.

Wait, is this using a cloud service in some way or is it all local / total private? That would be a deal breaker or maker.

Oh might as well copy a screen shot of the thumbnail and save it.

[katella]

I built an extension that injected a search bar into the transcript card. Worked by filtering the YouTube transcripts themselves, and manipulating their display attribute.

Didn't release it to the store because YouTube released a search feature and it looked exactly like mine.

[ewild]

would you prefer if the timestamp was hidden since it takes up a bigass portion of the screen or that being an option to hide it in the extension settings?

[modeless]

I think the timestamp is OK, my biggest complaint is the huge amount of whitespace between the rows and the small size of the box. If I designed YouTube I would put the transcript on the left side above the video description, with a button that expands it to full height so there's no separate scrollbar for the transcript anymore, it's just all directly in the page.

BTW when I went to look at a video just now, YouTube actually served me a "Search in Video" box at the top of the transcript. So I guess the feature exists, they just haven't rolled it out to everyone yet.

[ewild]

damn i see this after im 90% done and just have to make a fancy button lol

[madacol]

bookmarklet to "Show transcript"

    javascript:document.querySelector('button[aria-label="Show transcript"]').click()

<https://getbookmarklets.com/scripts/data%3Atext%2Fjavascript...>

[madacol]

As a userscript https://github.com/madacol/web-automation/blob/master/usersc...

    // ==UserScript==
    // @name        Always show transcript
    // @match       https://www.youtube.com/watch*
    // @grant       none
    // @version     1.0
    // @author      madacol
    // @description show transcript on all youtube videos
    // @run-at      document-idle
    // ==/UserScript==
    (async ()=>{
        (await getElementNotYetRendered(()=>document.querySelector('button[aria-label="Show transcript"]'))).click()

        function getElementNotYetRendered(elementGetter, delay = 200, timeout = 10000) {
            let retries = Math.ceil(timeout / delay);
            return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
                (function resolveIfElementFound() {
                    setTimeout(() => {
                        const element = elementGetter()
                        if (element?.toString().includes("Element")) return resolve(element)
                        if (element?.toString().includes("NodeList") && element.length > 0) return resolve(element)

                        if (retries-- <= 0) return console.error(`Max retries reached: element was not found
                        element: "${element}"
                        elementGetter: "${elementGetter}"
                        `);
                        resolveIfElementFound()
                    }, delay);
                })()
            })
        }
    })();

[madacol]

Vastly simplified userscript to only show transcript when pressing Ctrl+f

https://github.com/madacol/web-automation/blob/master/usersc...

    // ==UserScript==
    // @name        Show transcript on Ctrl+f
    // @match       https://www.youtube.com/watch*
    // @grant       none
    // @version     1.0
    // @author      madacol
    // ==/UserScript==
    document.addEventListener('keydown', event => {
        if (event.ctrlKey && event.key === 'f')
            document.querySelector('button[aria-label="Show transcript"]').click()
    })