YouTube playlist → study notes
A 20-lecture course is roughly ten hours of video. As text it is an hour of reading, and you can search it, highlight it and hand it to an AI to summarise lecture by lecture.
What you get
- One section of notes per lecture, in course order
- Key terms with the lecture they come from
- A one-page revision sheet for the whole course
With an AI assistant
Connect the MCP server to Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor, then paste:
With the API
Set GYT_API_KEY to a key from the developers page. Each transcript, list page or channel check costs one credit.
1. List the playlist (1 credit per page of up to 100 videos)
curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer $GYT_API_KEY" \ "https://getyoutubetranscript.com/api/v1/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP61Oq3tWYp6V_F-5jb5L2iHb"2. Get each lecture with timestamps (1 credit per video)
curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer $GYT_API_KEY" \ "https://getyoutubetranscript.com/api/v1/transcript?v=HtSuA80QTyo×tamps=true"
Limits to know
- Captions carry speech only: equations and diagrams shown on screen are not in the text, so check the video for those.
- Auto-generated captions can mishear technical terms; creator-written captions are more reliable.
Tools for this workflow
Questions
How long does a whole course take?
Listing a playlist is one request per 100 videos and each transcript is one request, usually under a second. A 20-lecture course is about 21 requests.
Can I do this without code?
Yes. Connect the MCP server to Claude or ChatGPT and paste the prompt above, or open the playlist in the playlist tool and copy the transcripts out.
