

Ask HN: Tools for taking notes on videos? - rpandey1234

What software exists for taking notes on videos? (e.g. lectures, political speeches, video games, or even music videos.) Having a clean and easy way to annotate video content according to timestamp would have lots of educational value. I&#x27;ve found these two sites which seem to do the job, but they seem clunky or non-intuitive:<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.videonot.es&#x2F;
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ant2.cehd.umn.edu&#x2F;<p>Can anyone suggest other options?
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jcr
If I was faced with your problem, I'd solve it in an odd way which _might_ not
be what you want.

I'd use subtitles.

With a bit of ffmpeg magic, I'd get the video file into MKV (Matroska) format
simply because I like them best and I find them easiest to edit. The important
piece is MKV supports embedding subtitle text into the video container format
as a separate "stream" (read:file). It's easy to add or remove subtitles.

The next problem is timing your text to specific parts of the video, but this
problem has mostly been solved by the fansub crowd. There are a few different
open and closed source subtitling programs out there. I have no experience
with them, so I can't make any suggestions. If I needed a solid suggestion,
I'd ask any of the fansub groups. They'd know what works well.

In most regards, what you want is the subtitling software itself since it
allows you to both view the video and _edit_ your text. If your text is
simple, it should do the trick.

EDIT: If you have the urge to do some hacking, you could also modify a player
like VLC or mplayer to show text in a separate window from the video. This
could help if you need to _present_ your additions to others.

~~~
ScottWhigham
Are you answering the same question OP asks though? By definition, "notes" are
your personal summary/questions/ideas about what's being presented. Your notes
might refer to the words in the presentation, or the video, or pictures, or
the music, or just random ideas that come to you. Subtitles are not that -
subtitles are the original text in its entirety. So I guess I don't see how
subtitles == notes.

~~~
jcr
Subtitles are just text data with a time code corresponding to a point in the
video, so the _feature_ of "subtitles" can be used to store whatever text you
want, including notes, even though keeping notes was not the intent of the
feature. There is nothing requiring the text data to be either an exact
transcription or translation of the audio data. In fact, some fansub groups
have released "joke" or "troll" translations for fun on various anime videos.

Once you generate your subtitle text file, you can easily merge it into the
video file. There are a few different subtitle text formats but the only one
I've really worked with is SSA/ASS.

The MKV video container format allows you to store multiple "streams" (files)
of ASCII or UTF-8 text synced by time codes to the video. The reason for
multiple subtitle streams is so one video (container) file can have subtitles
in multiple languages. This means if there's some hard limit (I'm not sure if
there is) on the amount of text you can have at a single time code, you can
get around the problem by adding another stream/file.

------
JohnnyAmos
I prefer the old standard of pen and paper for two good reasons:

1\. I hate typing.

2\. Handwriting aids retention more than typing.[1]

[1]
[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110119095458.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110119095458.htm)

