started saving youtube video transcripts in notion and it completely changed how i use video content
i watch a lot of youtube for work. mostly tutorials and conference talks. the problem was i'd watch a 45 minute video, pick up something useful, and then three weeks later have no idea which video it was in. i'd end up rewatching entire videos just to find one specific thing someone said. drove me insane.
so i made a notion database for it. nothing fancy. video title, url, topic tags, date watched, and a full transcript column. whenever i watch something worth keeping i grab the transcript and paste it in.
the transcript part is what makes it actually useful. instead of scrubbing through a video trying to find a 30 second segment i just search the database. "that thing about api rate limiting" or whatever and notion pulls it up from the text. game changer for me honestly.
getting clean transcripts was annoying though. youtube's built in transcript thing is painful to copy from. the formatting comes out weird and half the captions are wrong. i ended up paying for a $5/mo tool that just gives me clean text from any video url. paste the url, copy the output, drop it in notion. takes like 2 minutes.
i have about 80 videos in there now. it's probably the thing i use most in my whole notion workspace which is funny because it took me 10 minutes to set up.
anyway if you watch youtube for learning or work stuff and you're not saving transcripts somewhere searchable you're probably rewatching videos you already watched.