About

I'm Yao, a self-taught learner, and Long Video Notes is my study notebook, made public. I learn mostly from long, dense videos: full university lecture courses, multi-hour coding walkthroughs and conference keynotes. They are some of the best free teaching there is, but a two-hour lecture is hard to review, search or come back to a month later. These notes are how I work through them.

How the notes are made

I built my own app for this. For each video it pulls the transcript, scans the whole video for every slide, whiteboard state, diagram or finished piece of code, and drafts chapter-by-chapter notes with AI assistance. I then go through the video with the draft, rewrite it in my own words, and check it before anything goes up:

• every timestamp link opens the video at the moment it describes;
• numbers, names and results are checked against what is actually on screen where the video shows them, not just against auto-generated captions;
• for programming courses, code excerpts are compared line by line with the author's official repository;
• context I add from outside the video is labelled "Our note" instead of being put in the speaker's mouth.

The screenshots are frames from the video, each tied to its timestamp and captioned with what it shows and why it matters. No transcript is reproduced, quotes are kept short, and every page lists the original video, its channel and publication date, the date the notes were last updated, and the sources they draw on.

What's in the notes

Each video's notes give the structure of the video, key takeaways, notes for each chapter with timestamps, a short list of what you can skip on a re-watch, and a glossary. Course pages link the lectures in order, so you can follow a whole series the way I did.

Corrections

If you find a mistake, a broken timestamp or a missing credit, please tell me through the contact page. I fix errors and note the update date on the page.

Long Video Notes is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the creators, universities or companies whose videos are covered here. Videos and trademarks belong to their respective owners.