What is NoteWise?
YouTube has become one of the richest learning platforms on the planet — university lectures, conference talks, technical deep-dives, language lessons, and entire courses are all freely available. But video is a passive medium. You watch, you nod, and two days later the details are gone. NoteWise was built to fix that gap. Point it at any YouTube URL and walk away with Markdown study notes that are deeper and more comprehensive than most people would write by hand. The output isn’t a transcript summary — it’s structured, hierarchical Markdown with headers, sub-topics, definitions, examples, and every concept explained in depth. Chapter-aware videos get per-chapter notes. Long courses produce an organized note file per session. Everything lands in your filesystem: portable, searchable, and permanently yours.Who is it for?
Students
Catch up on lecture recordings or supplement textbooks with YouTube explanations — without spending an extra hour taking notes by hand.
Developers
Stay on top of conference talks, tutorials, and technical deep-dives without watching at 3x speed.
Language learners
Extract structured notes from native-language content to accelerate comprehension and vocabulary retention.
Researchers
Quickly distil hours of talks into organized, searchable reference material without manual transcription.
Teams
Turn internal video presentations into shareable written documentation that lives alongside your codebase.
Key capabilities
| Capability | Description |
|---|---|
| Single video, playlists, and batch | Process one video, an entire playlist, or a .txt file of URLs in a single command |
| Multi-provider LLM support | Works with Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, Mistral, Cohere, DeepSeek, and xAI via LiteLLM |
| Chapter-aware notes | Automatically detects video chapters and generates separate, structured notes per chapter |
| Quiz generation | Optionally produce a ready-to-use multiple-choice quiz alongside each study guide |
| Transcript export | Export raw transcripts as plain .txt or timestamped .json |
| Concurrent processing | Configurable concurrency — process multiple videos and chapters simultaneously |
| Local SQLite cache | Transcripts and run stats are cached; skip already-processed videos automatically |
| Rich live dashboard | Real-time progress UI with a --no-ui plain-output mode for CI/cron |
| Docker ready | Minimal two-stage Docker image for reproducible, stateless runs |
| Private video support | Pass a Netscape-format cookie file to process age-gated or login-required videos |
Get started
Installation
Install NoteWise with uv, pipx, pip, a standalone binary, or Docker.
Quick start
Configure your API key and generate your first study notes in under five minutes.