Short, practical guides on getting transcripts and putting them to work. Each one takes about a minute to read and links to the pages it mentions, so you can follow every step without leaving the site.
All guides
- YouTube transcriptsWhether you are quoting a specific timestamp, scanning a 2-hour conference talk, or preparing source text for an AI prompt, accessing a complete YouTube transcript should take seconds. Here is how to view native transcripts on YouTube, how to copy clean text without clutter, and how to extract transcripts when captions are missing or disabled.
- Podcast transcriptsPodcast episodes hold valuable research, interviews, and insights, but audio is inherently unsearchable. Whether you need to cite a timestamped quote, study a lecture, or feed a 90-minute conversation into Claude or Obsidian, a complete transcript makes audio usable. Here is how to transcribe podcast episodes from Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and local audio files — and how to overcome platform export limits.
- AI-ready transcriptsLarge language models like Claude, ChatGPT, and NotebookLM are unmatched at summarizing arguments and extracting research takeaways. However, they lack ears: paste a YouTube link or a podcast episode into a chat window, and the model will decline. Here is how to bridge the gap — turning any public video or podcast into clean, token-efficient Markdown, and using it as grounded context in your favorite AI.
- Transcript vs. summary: which do you need?A transcript is every word, in order, with timestamps. A summary is a shorter retelling someone chose for you. If you need to quote someone exactly, search what was said, or build notes you can trust, start with the transcript — you can always summarize from it, but you cannot recover the exact wording from a summary.
- Turn a lecture into searchable notesTaking notes from a 90-minute university lecture or technical talk is frustrating when you have to pause every thirty seconds to scribble down equations or arguments. A complete, timestamped transcript converts hours of spoken video and audio into structured text you can search, highlight, and link directly into your second brain. Here is how to turn YouTube videos, recorded lectures, and podcasts into clean Markdown notes in Obsidian and Notion.
- How VideoScript pricing worksVideoScript bills by the minute, not by subscription: one Credit covers one minute of media, rounded up to the next whole minute, and Credits only leave your balance when a transcript succeeds. You can buy hours once and keep them, or take a 30-Day Pass for a lower per-hour rate. Here is how both work and how to tell which one fits.
- How many tokens in a 1-hour podcast?When feeding long podcasts, interviews, and lectures into large language models, token consumption dictates context fit, processing speed, and API cost. But how many tokens does spoken audio actually produce per minute or per hour? Here is a rigorous benchmark measuring speech rate, token density, and formatting overhead across modern frontier models including GPT-5.6, Claude Opus 4.6 / 4.8, and Gemini 3.7 / 3.8.
New here? Start with how VideoScript works or check the supported sources.