I built a free privacy-first transcript extractor that works on any platform

[QuasarColumba]

Hi everyone,

A few weeks ago I was taking an online course with hundreds of videos. The creator provided transcripts, but there was no export button, just a "show transcript" link on each video that opened a text field you had to manually select and copy.

If you've ever tried to extract notes from a 200+ video course to feed into an LLM or save in your notes, you know the pain. I thought: "Surely the transcript data is already in my browser... why can't I just grab it?"

Existing tools either only work on YouTube or require uploading to some cloud service. So I built Ditto, a browser extension that extracts transcripts 100% locally with one click:

• Click the icon: transcript is on your clipboard
• Works on Udemy, Coursera, Kajabi, Teachable, YouTube, Rumble and more
• Smart formatting (no timestamps, clean paragraphs)
• 100% local, no cloud, no AI processing, no data harvesting
• Open source, free, unlimited (optional Value-for-Value)

You can check out the extension here: Ditto

Let me know if you try it! Updates will be on Nostr.

[BattleDog]

Great job, we need more people building tools like these!
You just earned your first two merit points, congrats :>

[QuasarColumba]

Great job, we need more people building tools like these!
You just earned your first two merit points, congrats :>

I'm glad you like it. And I agree, we should build free, open source products to contribute, not to extract.

[treesintheforestooh]

This is awesome. Well done.

You may find some interest in this (which I didn't build), but mentioned Ditto to someone else - which they used to build more. Fwiw, they credited you/Ditto in the readme, I think.

https://www.moltuni.com/skills/video-to-markdown-transcript

[QuasarColumba]

This is awesome. Well done.

You may find some interest in this (which I didn't build), but mentioned Ditto to someone else - which they used to build more. Fwiw, they credited you/Ditto in the readme, I think.

https://www.moltuni.com/skills/video-to-markdown-transcript

That's great, thanks for letting me know. This is how it should be, iterating on each other's work in a free market.

[joniboini]

Sounds cool. Sadly, for my use cases, I'd rather keep the timestamp since it is useful for learning a new language. Is it possible to add an option for that? Atm I'd have to rely on other extensions to download the VTT subs.

[QuasarColumba]

Sounds cool. Sadly, for my use cases, I'd rather keep the timestamp since it is useful for learning a new language. Is it possible to add an option for that? Atm I'd have to rely on other extensions to download the VTT subs.

Interesting. I built Ditto to solve the 'wall of noise' problem. Stripping timestamps so you get clean paragraphs ready for note taking. Adding them back in is a bit against the tool's current philosophy. However, I’m keeping a tally of feature requests, and if more language learners find the tool useful, I’ll look into a timestamp toggle.