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LeiaKn's avatar
LeiaKn
Iron Contributor
Oct 24, 2025

What’s the best YouTube video summarizer right now?

Hey folks — I’m drowning in long vids and need something that can spit out solid summaries (key points + timestamps) without me watching 2 hours every time. Ideally it should work from the URL, handl...
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TexasOasis's avatar
TexasOasis
Iron Contributor
Oct 24, 2025

What is the best YouTube video summarizer right now? yt-dllp is free and powerful for downloading videos, captions, or audio. Whisper (by OpenAI) is open-source and free to run locally if you have the hardware, allowing transcription without additional costs. GPT API can be used for summarization, but note that the API has usage limits and costs beyond free tiers. For a fully free solution, you might want to explore open-source summarization models like GPT-J or Llama. Parsing timestamps from captions or transcripts helps generate timestamps in summaries, which is exactly what you want for key points with timestamps.

Workflow:

  • Download captions or audio with yt-dllp.
  • Transcribe with Whisper (if no captions).
  • Summarize with GPT API or an open-source YouTube video summarizer.
  • Optionally, parse timestamps from captions or transcript.

 

If you have technical skills, this workflow is cost-effective (mostly only hardware and time).
If you prefer a more straightforward, less technical method, then web apps or browser extensions might be more practical, but they might not be entirely free or customizable.

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