Show HN: TubePen – My attempt to get more out of YouTube learning

tubepen.com

73 points by n0vella 7 days ago

Hi HN! I made this because I always forget what I'm trying to learn from YouTube.

Test yourself: Can you remember the main concepts from the last (educational) video you watched?

So, why not highlight and take notes on YouTube videos, just like in books? That's TubePen.

I’d love your feedback! What do you think of my landing page? Use the 10-day free trial and see if it’s useful for you.

Thanks!

Leftium - 6 days ago

I tried signing up for the free trial subscription, and am starting to regret it.

I successfully entered my credit card details (4 times), yet it still says I don't have an active subscription. So besides not being able to try this app, there is also no way to cancel my automatic payments, which starts on Jan 18.

After fixing this onboarding problem, I suggest making it possible to try without giving any personal information. (I expected the video player on the landing page to be functional, but I guess just the note section is.)

Also there are many typos on the site. Like "loged in as"

n0vella - 6 days ago

Please write me an email to n0vella@outlook.com to see what happened. I'm going to check the logs, nothing must be charged to you.
Typos are also my fault as english isn't my mother language, Will check that also.
- Leftium - 5 days ago
  
  The OP sorted out the subscription/signup/billing issues.
  The main reason I signed up was for a nice way to search through YouTube transcripts. YouTube requires many clicks, and the transcript is jammed into a small div.
  Another reason I signed up was because I was curious how the YouTube videos were being embedded. It seems like just via the YouTube API?
  - rinvi - 3 days ago
    
    You can pull YouTube transcripts directly with a tool like this: https://youtubetranscript.com/
    This can be done programmatically with YouTube Transcript API [0]
    But you may get IP blocked if you do it a lot so you can use a Tor proxy [1].
    Afterwards, you can just cmd/ctrl+f through it or throw it at an LLM.
    [0] https://github.com/jdepoix/youtube-transcript-api
    [1] https://github.com/rinvii/yt-transcript
- - 4 days ago
  
  [deleted]
- Leftium - 6 days ago
  
  I forwarded the email I already sent to support@tubepen.com.
  Another typo is "Acess to the entire platform"
  - n0vella - 6 days ago
    
    Seems like outlook stop receiving emails from cloudflare redirection:
    upstream (outlook-com.olc.protection.outlook.com.) temporary error: Unknown error: transient error (451): 4.7.650 The mail server [104.30.10.49] has been temporarily rate limited due to IP reputation
    I don't know how to deal with this so right now you can contact me on n0vella@outlook.com
    
    bogdanstanciu - 3 days ago
    
    Stress!
    Good luck and congrats on launch.

rgbrgb - 4 days ago

Looks cool, love work in this direction. I wonder how learning rates w this would compare to taking notes on paper like in a traditional lecture, which some studies show improves learning [0].

[0]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-ha...

n0vella - 3 days ago

Back on Highschool some teachers aware us about this particular con of laptops, I always thought that the worst part is that we are very prone to distractions and laptops offer a lot. Now my point of view is that a "cool" UI can give the brain some dopamine and keep you stick to learning more time than you would in a notebook, so this behaviour could counterbalance the handwriting benefits. At least, this is the theory. Nice point!
rinvi - 3 days ago

This.
Handwriting is extremely important.
Anecdote: been learning Mandarin for almost a month now, I've been typing the pinyin of each character and my retention did not improve significantly. So, for the past week, I've been learning how to write it on my phone Chinese drawing keyboard and so far I've learned over 60 new characters all in the past 5-6 days with a surprisingly strong retention rate.

maalber - 7 days ago

Really neat idea actually! I love the landing page, both the interactive part and particularly the visual style. One thing that I would note though, is that scrolling down, I expected the images to be interactive since they blend in with the rest of the page and look like interactive elements. I would either try to make it more obvious that they are example images, or actually make them interactive

n0vella - 7 days ago

You are right. I think those images need some css to let the user know that are images.
Thank you very much for the feedback!

luigipederzani - a day ago

Love the concept—TubePen is super cool! A couple of quick thoughts:

1. Make it so we can just paste the video URL instead of editing it ourselves. Way easier. 2. Let people try it without logging in first. Login walls are hurt conversions!

Seriously, though, this has so much potential. Can’t wait to see where it goes!

ldenoue - 17 hours ago

looks great. I made a similar app called Scribe where you can highlight passages of the transcript. It's working on the web but also as an iOS app. https://www.appblit.com/scribe

To solve the server IP sometimes being blocked by YouTube, the app fetches the transcripts in the browser.

registeredcorn - 3 days ago

1. It would be nice if there was a short video, gif, or webm showing TubePen working. I see the image examples and they are nice, but seeing it "in motion" would be a nice reassurance before signing up.

2. I use brave browser on mobile to watch youtube, so videos automatically set to m.youtube.com/whatever. In order for me to try TubePem on mobile I had to drop the leading "m" subdomain and switch youtube to TubePen. Not sure if you could get things working with the subdomain m.tubepen.com, but it might be nice.

Anyway, cool idea. I hope it does well. :)

n0vella - 3 days ago

Haha, thank you! It's pretty difficult to balance demos, free plans and those other ways to show your product. I choosed the 10 days full featured subscription plan, as I'm using Stripe you are not leaving your payment details in another website, and you can cancel anytime. Anyway I will think about a working demo or something.
On mobile isn't possible to make new selections yet, but you can still open a video pasting the url on the box in the home page, that should work with "m." url also.

joelthelion - 4 days ago

What I'd like from a site like this is to be quizzed on the videos I watch, right after watching and maybe a few days after. I think that would have a large effect on learning.

maleldil - 4 days ago

There are quite a few services that use generative models to generate quizzes from YouTube videos.
n0vella - 3 days ago

This is a good idea to steal ;) There are plenty of features that llms can provide to TubePen, if the idea goes on I will work on it. Thank you!

pplonski86 - 7 days ago

Congrats on launch. I see many people learning on YouTube, that might be useful tool. Probably you can easily integrate it with LLM and generate summary and quizzes based on videos

n0vella - 6 days ago

It could be an aditional feature in the future. Thanks for the feedback.

skeeter2020 - 3 days ago

I don't get it. nothing on the landing page "works"? what's going on here?

n0vella - 3 days ago

Hey, please tell me how you are reaching the site. Please be aware of selection doesn't work on mobile browsers yet (selection events are different). You can still change color of highlights and add notes by clicking on them. On landing page demo there is no video, just a mock with TubePen logo.

purpleinfs - 3 days ago

neat