Hieroglyph, a research tool to easily view a YouTube video's transcript

I use "YouTube Captions Search" Chrome extension. This allows the following workflow:

- I am on a YouTube video view

- I click on "Closed Captions" (CC) in the YouTube player.

- The extension icon in Chrome's toolbar becomes red.

- I click on the extension icon

- A search text field appears

- I type a word or a sentence

- There is an area with timestamps and sentences containing the words I search

This is useful in two ways:

1. For videos I have already watched that I know contain a segment of interest to me and I want to re-listen to that segment. I go to the video, type the words, click on the timestamp and it takes me straight to the timestamp of interest.

2. Discovery: when I'm learning about something specific and there's a one hour video and I want to know if they're addressing my specific question. I type the words and see how many times they're talking about the topic (density). I read the sentences, and then click on the timestamps directly before committing to the video. So when I'm actively learning about a topic, I might have a backlog of ten videos, this speeds up things enormously.

One more hack: I use "Video Speed Controller"[1] to speed up videos up to 16x. For talks that don't have a link to the slides, I'll use the 16x video as a "presentation slides". One hour becomes about 4 minutes long and I just look at the slides on the screen. If I like the treatment of the topic, I'll watch the video. If not, I won't. This allows me again to have a backlog of 20 videos to watch, go through them really fast, discard the ones that do not have a deep enough treatment of the topic of interest, and only commit to the videos that do.

- [0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-captions-s...

- [1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...

For one, YouTube gives you time codes, which are good when translating, but just in the way when reading or editing (say to find a quote). Second, while a minor annoyance, the text is hard scroll and read, due to how constricted the reading area is. Hieroglyph gives you a huge blob, which isn't super-fantastic either, but IMHO it's slightly better than YouTube's "view transcript" functionality, if nothing else, than for reasons of presentation.

I'm interested in the metaphysical theories presented by yoga instructors. There are zero scholarly papers that deal with transcripts of yoga classes.

Now I can easily gather a corpus of text from the huge number of yoga classes online!

JSON.parse(ytplayer.config.args.player_response).captions.playerCaptionsTracklistRenderer.captionTracks[0].baseUrl

just add &tlang=XX where XX is one of

JSON.parse(ytplayer.config.args.player_response).captions.playerCaptionsTracklistRenderer.translationLanguages

You could consider extracting the YouTube audio and using an aligner algorithm with the transcript to get precise timing without paying anything