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Harald Vöhringer, PhD

Thoughts and observations.

Youtube notetaking with Obsidian

LogSeq had a very convenient way import Youtube videos into the database. All you really had to do was to paste the link into a new empty page, et voila, the video would embed into the page. To make notes I would simply use the Helium plugin which enables to scroll the page while keeping the embedded video visible in the app.

Recently, I however switched to Obsidian. There were just too many things in LogSeq that I found really annoying, most importantly it's lack of speed and the mandatory outliner mode. Obsidian is much faster than LogSeq and gives me the freedom to format my writing in any format. Further, it's community has many awesome plugins which I haven't hardly explored yet.

One important task upon switching to Obsidian was to figure out how to take notes from Youtube videos as I am using the resource quite often to learn new things. Obsidian does not support video embeds as easily as LogSeq does, but luckily has the "TimeStamper" plugin which I now use to take notes from Youtube Videos. Before we can use conviniently, we need to set some hotkeys:

Hotkeys

I start by creating a new note and then look up the Youtube Url of the video I'd like to take notes for. Next, I paste the link into the novel note. To get the TimeStamp plugin to work, I now select the pasted URL and use the hotkey CMD+SHIFT+Y to "open" the video player. It should now be highlighted in blue. I then start to watch the video and pause the player with CMD+SHIFT+P and insert timstamps with CMD+SHIFT+I. Works like a charm :).