Find a YouTube video based on closed captions keyword search?

#1

Post by sigmaprimus » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 6:42 AM UTC

I am trying to find a Jay Leno Headlines item of my cousin's name and picture appearing in the Regina Leader Post as the Paperboy of the week/month. I have watched many videos but there are hundreds of hours and many duplicates.

I was hoping that the closed captions for videos were indexed by google but I am not sure if they are and if there is a certain syntax to use for searching captions.

I tried googling this but have only found searching within a specific video rather than across the library.

To be more specific, his name is Rick Lee and the Headline appeared on the show sometime around Y2K.

Any help and or guidance would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks

Re: Find a YouTube video based on closed captions keyword search?

#2

Post by activiation » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 7:13 AM UTC

There are browser extensions to search captions on a single video but I don't know of any better options.. which is kind of ridiculous considering Google owns YouTube.

Here is one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-capti...

Re: Find a YouTube video based on closed captions keyword search?

#3

Post by calderknight » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 7:18 AM UTC

You can open the video transcript and ctrl+f to find the text you are looking for.

This at least would save you having to watch the videos.

Re: Find a YouTube video based on closed captions keyword search?

#4

Post by Leftium » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 7:35 AM UTC

These might help:

- https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/34826944

- https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/36009774

Re: Find a YouTube video based on closed captions keyword search?

#5

Post by rasz » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 7:38 AM UTC

ask chatgpt, Im sure they slurped all YT transcripts for learning

Re: Find a YouTube video based on closed captions keyword search?

#6

Post by lathiat » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 8:09 AM UTC

https://incaptions.com/

Re: Find a YouTube video based on closed captions keyword search?

#7

Post by a2128 » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 8:10 AM UTC

Someone made a website to search through channels or playlists. Not sure if it still works but it might help: https://ytks.app/

Re: Find a YouTube video based on closed captions keyword search?

#8

Post by stonks » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 8:19 AM UTC

You can try to use https://filmot.com/ to search videos by closed captions.

I tried to search but could not find the video.

Re: Find a YouTube video based on closed captions keyword search?

#9

Post by dekatron » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 9:54 AM UTC

Not a solution, but somewhat related: https://youglish.com/ lets you search YouTube videos for keywords, but the purpose is to find examples of how to pronounce words from real usage. It also works for a few other languages aside from English.

Re: Find a YouTube video based on closed captions keyword search?

#10

Post by OrderlyTiamat » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 10:18 AM UTC

this is not a complete solution, but you seem to know what videos you're going to search through rather than wanting to search through everything. If that's the case, I recommend downloading the subtitles for every video via yt-dlp [1] as shown in this stackoverflow question [2] (it doesn't download the video itself this way to save bandwidth):

    yt-dlp --all-subs --skip-download https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ye8mB6VsUHw

(The answer uses youtube-dl, but I prefer yt-dlp, it works with these same options when I tried it)

When you've downloaded all subtitles, you can simply grep through them. I hope this helps!

[1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

[2] https://superuser.com/a/927532/1071647