notewise

A command-line tool that turns any YouTube video or playlist into structured, hierarchical Markdown study notes automatically.

The Problem

YouTube is one of the richest learning platforms available — lectures, conference talks, tutorials, full courses. But video is a passive medium. You watch, and two days later the details are gone. Writing notes by hand doubles your time investment. NoteWise eliminates that tradeoff entirely.

What It Does

Point NoteWise at any YouTube URL and it produces deep study notes with headers, sub-topics, definitions, and examples — not a transcript dump. Chapter-aware videos get per-chapter note files. Long playlists are processed concurrently and organized automatically.

Single videos, full playlists, and batch URL files. Chapter detection with separate notes per chapter. Optional multiple-choice quiz generation. Raw transcript export in plain .txt or timestamped .json. Local SQLite cache so already-processed videos are skipped. 8+ LLM providers via LiteLLM — Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, and more. Docker-ready for reproducible runs.

Why I Built It

I needed a way to catch up on university lecture recordings and conference talks without watching everything twice. NoteWise started as a personal script and grew into a fully packaged, CI-tested open-source tool.