Is there a service yet which turns a video from YouTube or whatever into a ppt? In a smart way ofcourse (based on amount of change of the particular frames). Would pay for that.
Issues: first of all, transcript quality: those of TED (Chris Anderson's "Technology Entertainment Design" conferences) are curated, those of YT are oftentimes not. Then, discriminating significant and less significant keyframes, but if one only needs "decent" instead of "perfect", good compromises for heuristic algorithms (more "parametrized procedures" or "recipes") can surely be found.
You are tempting me... In an evening one should get something already usable. Better than a presentation, I see the transcript text with aside thumbnails linking to the full-sized images. As someone who sometimes studies material from video, when I am listening or watching I am not in the strict need for text analysis, and when I am working on the text itself I do not need the video. On the other hand, if I think of the MIT OpenCourseware material and similar (Yale etc.), the "blackboard" shots can be precious to have alongside the text.
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¹ ffmpeg -i video.mkv -vf "select=eq(pict_type\,I)" -vsync vfr -frame_pts true keyframes-%02d.jpgthe general rule is that you can read about twice as fast as you can understand spoken word - 300 vs 150 words per minute.
I remember reading this my first day in a public speaking class in college. Just one of those factoids that’s stuck with me, and why I’ve always preferred reading articles versus seeking videos.
Of course, speed of comprehension is just one consideration. I’m mindful that there are some contexts where a visual is necessary or particularly helpful, and that some folks resonate with visual/spoken word more than written.
But this is why I love HN. It’s almost always a link to a written article, and I can pop open comments (which I often do first) for more written text on the subject.
In contrast, I can spend an entire day listening to people; and, while I am listening, I can be looking into the distance, the way human eyes are supposed to mostly be used. I can walk around, cook and eat food, or even shower, all while listening to people talk. I would argue listening to other people is a much more "human" activity than staring at symbols (despite how much I do this for my passion: software development).
I also have no clue where you got those numbers from: the iPad software I have finally found to read PDFs to me has me configure it in words per minute, and I find it reasonable to understand 400 words per minute for long stretches. I bet I could go faster (this software supports 500), but it would likely be mentally taxing.
To put in context how preposterous 150 words per minute is, the average person supposedly speaks at 100-130 words per minute according to some random source I just found (which feels right as I took years of linguistics and was going to guess 110-120), and we know people routinely listen to videos at 2x (and so are hitting 200-260).
(I think it is also worth noting that actual speed reading is a skill most people do not have. I actually think it quite likely that your average person can read only as fast as they can speak, as I bet that people who are not really really good at reading are subvocalizing. I feel like a lot of people don't consider this when saying everyone should read all the time.)
Like someone else said; it depends on the subject of course: fixing an issue with a washing machine (not operation, but with the internal electrics or something), a video is faster but otherwise...
“I’m mindful that there are some contexts where a visual is necessary or particularly helpful, and that some folks resonate with visual/spoken word more than written.“
Strangely, I was never a reader as a child, but took to it as an adult.
> the general rule is that you can read about twice as fast as you
> can understand spoken word - 300 vs 150 words per minute.
But sometimes the more efficient reading text instead of listening to a video is negated by not being able to multitask. E.g. The "dead" time of driving, walking a treadmill, raking leaves in the yard, etc can be filled by listening to text. Can't do that with a book.
That's why productivity can be helped with both complementary technologies:
- audio-to-text: auto-generated transcripts from video for max speed and random seeking
- text-to-audio: auto-generated TTS (text-to-speech) from text to multitask while performing a mindless physical activity. This helps get through backlog of books and articles without having to block out dedicated reading time while nothing else is getting done.
The Youtube auto-generated transcripts work that way. On most videos, you click on the "..." (3 dots) to access it. Then click on the text fragment and it instantly seeks to that part of the video.
Since it uses AI algorithms, there will be misspelled names or technical terms but it's still useful.
Have you watched many educational YouTube videos lately?
I used to also prefer reading for most things, but YouTube and advances in technology have just made educational/edutainment videos so much better than they used to be. There are some incredible videos out there.
Of course this depends on the subject, if I want to deep-dive on e.g. maths, of course only a Textbook will suffice.