Convert a 2-hour lecture into searchable notes
- Paste the lecture's YouTube URL
- Extract the full transcript
- Save to your note-taking app (Notion, Obsidian, Apple Notes, etc.)
- Now searchable for terms, formulas, or names without rewatching
SubExtract for Students
Convert YouTube lectures, tutorials, and explainer videos into searchable text for note-taking, study guides, and reference material.
Workflows
Build a study guide from a video series
- Use Playlist Videos to extract the playlist's full video list
- Extract transcripts for each video in the playlist
- Combine into a single document organized by playlist order
- Annotate with your own notes — the source material is captured forever
Citing a tutorial in homework
- Extract the tutorial's transcript
- Quote the exact instruction or formula with its timestamp
- Cite as: 'Creator Name, Video Title, YouTube, [date], [HH:MM:SS]'
- Avoids the 'video is gone' problem — your citation is verifiable from the saved transcript
Recommended tool combinations
Lecture archive stack
Capture an entire course's worth of video lectures as a structured, searchable text archive.
Mixed media notes
Combine YouTube tutorial transcripts with web article extracts for unified study notes across video and text sources.
Real-world examples
Searching across a semester's worth of lectures
Extract every lecture from your course's YouTube playlist, save as text files with the lecture date in the filename. Now `grep "derivative"` (or similar text search) finds every mention across the whole semester. Beats scrubbing through video timelines.
Building a personal flashcard deck
Extract a video tutorial's transcript, identify key terms and definitions, paste into Anki or your flashcard app of choice. The video becomes raw material for spaced-repetition study.
Frequently asked questions
Related tools & guides
SubExtract for Researchers
Extract YouTube transcripts, comments, and channel catalogs as structured data for academic research and qualitative analysis.
YouTube Video Captions Extractor
Extract captions and subtitles from any YouTube video. Download transcripts as SRT files with timestamps.
YouTube Playlist Videos Extractor
Extract every video from a YouTube playlist with metadata. Export the full playlist as CSV.