HACKER Q&A
📣 andrewfromx

Good way to extract small parts of YouTube videos as you watch


I've been using youtube-dl for years. And https://freetubeapp.io/ is amazing. But what I really want is right in the gui where the video is playing being able to mark timecode1,timecode2 and then download just that small clip.

Flow like this: hit spacebar to pause, then press A to mark that SpotA and then hit space bar again to resume playing... space again to pause, then press B to mark that SpotB. Download and repeat again for another section in video.

Before I build myself a gui to do this, is there a good way already?

  👤 itsankur Accepted Answer ✓
Haven't heard of one. But this sounds pretty slick. I could envision a Premier Pro like interface with clear starts and stops for each sequence combined with simple keyboard interactions being pretty awesome.

I think the main thing you'll need to figure out is how to get users from a youtube video to this software. Maybe a Chrome Extension?

👤 andrewfromx
update I got this: "I would recommend watching the video in FreeTube, writing down all the time ranges and then using yt-dlp with it's --download-sections option.

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/master/README.md#user-..."

👤 SushiHippie
Searching for "youtube cutter"/"get youtube video snippets" shows many websites which can do something like this, although not as an extension