Show HN: SumThatUp – Generate Summaries and Mind Maps from YouTube Videos

I built SumThatUp (https://sumthatup.com/) to generate summaries, key takeaways, and mind maps from YouTube videos. No sign-up required.

Why I Made This

I often get YouTube links from friends, but watching long videos isn’t always practical. I wanted a way to quickly grasp the main points without sitting through the entire thing.

How It Works

SumThatUp pulls the video transcript and generates a summary from the text. This has two advantages:
• Efficiency – Processing text requires fewer tokens than analyzing video directly.
• Speed – Summarizing transcripts is faster than processing raw video.

Limitations
• It only works with videos that have transcripts.
• It can’t capture purely visual information.
• Extracting transcripts from very long videos can be a challenge.

I also tested Gemini’s YouTube summarizer for videos without transcripts, but it ran into token limits—a 15-minute video needed over 1 million tokens.

Open Questions
• What are other good approaches for summarizing videos?
• How to handle videos without transcripts?
• How could the mind map visualization be improved?

Next Steps

I plan to add PDF and text exports soon. Feedback is welcome!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43360320

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