What is your experience with YouTube?

Question

We used to find answers and learn things for work from YouTube, but our pain was that most of the time we just need a QUICK and SHORT piece from a long video, rather than spend a big block of time watching through the whole thing.

What about you? Could you share your YouTube experience?

Stephan Kreutzer · Accepted Answer

It's absolute crap. For the specific problem you've pointed out, most videos on YouTube get an automatic transcript generated, so you can open and search it for keywords, to find the playtime timestamp of the occurrence of a specific part. Furthermore, you can add time marks to the URL, so the player will start from that position and not from the start. Together with embedding, you can also specify an end position, so it'll play just a portion/clip. Should be a general tool/feature for working with (online/offline) video. With some ffmpeg magic, it could be an automated clipping tool, like Edit Decision Lists.

Update: Ah, I learned from your profile that you've already built it.