So, is there such a site for the transcripts for those videos? I'm old fashioned and read much faster than a human can talk, so I don't see the reason to spend 45 min watching a talking head.
We (Manning Publications) added transcripts as a pretty central feature of our video platform. I'd be pretty interested to hear what you thought. A lot of our customers asked for this when we were researching what they wanted, so I'm always interested to see if people outside our usual user base like what we've done: https://livevideo.manning.com/module/31_1_2/algorithms-in-mo...?
This is excellent — I love the link between the transcript and the video. Being able to click the text and jump to that point in the video works fluidly; I can read ahead and jump to things I want to see explained visually. The presentation of the transcript is also much better than the broken-line-by-line approach that others such as YouTube take: https://d.pr/i/WvrOX5.
This is the perfect combination of ebook and video for me, and I didn't know Manning was doing this. Some minor feedback:
- I wish the transcript text size could be increased without affecting the rest of the UI (which seems fine). Maybe it can and I missed it, or I need to be logged in?
- I see “pause on try its” in the page options (it's checked and disabled) but couldn't find any videos that use this. This feature sounds like it would greatly enhance the learning experience and it should be part of all videos. I learn a lot more when actively trying things than when passively watching and reading, and few online courses combine video and text transcripts with hands-on opportunities well.
I just bought Algorithms in Motion on the back of this experience, though, (plus a couple of books I'd been considering) and am looking forward to going through the whole course.
> - I wish the transcript text size could be increased without affecting the rest of the UI (which seems fine). Maybe it can and I missed it, or I need to be logged in?
Totally agreed we need this. I've passed this feedback onto the developers (I'm in editorial here).
> - I see “pause on try its” in the page options (it's checked and disabled) but couldn't find any videos that use this. This feature sounds like it would greatly enhance the learning experience and it should be part of all videos. I learn a lot more when actively trying things than when passively watching and reading, and few online courses combine video and text transcripts with hands-on opportunities well.
Yep, we're still experimenting with this feature. I think you'll see us using it much, much more in future content.
> Totally agreed we need this. I've passed this feedback onto the developers (I'm in editorial here).
As a customer, I've been seeing the changes they've been doing over the years, and absolutely love the work they've done. At every stage, you can see the attention and care to simple things that make the Manning site a pleasure and the experience better and better. Tell them to keep up the good work.
This is super-awesome. Any chance you get all the online course providers (like Coursera) to adopt this ASAP? :) The only thing that is missing there now is the ability to make bookmarks, and have those to be able to reference externally (i.e. go to bookmark by URL) and the thing is very close to perfect. Oh, and maybe also make an option to do horizontal split instead of vertical - since most videos are wider than they are tall you get bigger video with the same split.
It's in-house, yes. Interestingly, the original code base was designed to tie book text to audio-book readings, which we use in our liveBook platform. There's various third-party libraries in play for some of it, but other than that we've built it all in-house.
>I'm old fashioned and read much faster than a human can talk, so I don't see the reason to spend 45 min watching a talking head.
I agree that people can read at 200+ wpm while most people only talk at ~100 wpm. However, some programming presentations are visually intensive with demonstrations of interactive features. That would be videos such as showing how an IDE works (debugging tips and tricks), CSS transforms, GUI workflow (e.g. navigate AWS admin screens to set up security, auto-scaling, etc). For example, I see that the landing page has severgal Google I/O keynotes and those are always heavy with demos.
But yes, for presentations of static text such as explaining the new syntax for C++11, a "talking head" reading the slides may not add much value and just slow you down.
As for transcripts... Since many videos seem to come from YouTube, it may be possible to download the auto-generated captions.[1] (I don't have a YouTube account so I have no idea how well this works.) I noticed one presentation where a speaker was talking about "Qt" framework but the Youtube's speech recognition auto-captioned it as "cute". I don't know if mistranslation is a rare and minor annoyance or if it makes the transcripts unusable.
To downvoters: please let me know what I wrote that didn't add positive contribution to this discussion.
I wouldn't bother with the automatically generated ones, though. They are not good enough. (Whenever there are real captions, I turn them on to be able to speed up the video beyond the point where I can no longer hear what people say. That's great!)
How can you tell if the captions are real vs auto-generated? Do you mean "real" as in subtitles that are burned into the video source instead of being dynamically overlaid?
I don't mean burnt into the video. The YouTube inteface says "auto-generated" when it is the case (example [0]). Sometimes, though, it seems that uploaders have taken auto-generated captions and added them as if they were manually made, so then YouTube doesn't label it correctly.
Ok, I never noticed that. I just read the captions and assumed obvious misspellings were auto-generated.
For example in this video[1], the caption text is "L1D cache misses" but he's actually saying "L1-dcache misses". (The Linux terminal screen he's showing does display "L1-dcache".) Even though that video is not labeled as "auto-generated", I assumed it was because of the bad caption. Based on your info, I guess CppCon uses humans like Mechanical Turk or other non-domain typists to manually add the captions.
Manual captioning is almost always not done by domain experts, but by people who have some training with a captioning system and work as professional captionists. Their main advantage is that they'll caption much faster and much cheaper than having domain experts do it, but the quality tends to suffer.
In college, I met a deaf guy who always had two women accompany him to lectures; one of them would repeat everything into a mouth-covering microphone to generate an automatic transcription and the other went over it to correct obvious errors. They generated a lot of nonsense, especially when the German professor was using some English loanwords for CS concepts. I was always amazed that the deaf guy still somehow managed to learn something from these garbled transcriptions.
(Re: AWS config) Oh yes, the MCSE books with screenshots of wizards. Those can be done as a video, or condensed 100:1 if you give up on the screenshots and just write the option names. All admin interfaces that I've been in had text descriptions for every element, you just need to read them.
>Oh yes, the MCSE books with screenshots of wizards.
Yes, I get the point that many books have gratuitous screen shots to pad the page count. But that's a separate issue from the idea that some videos don't translate well to transcripts.
>had text descriptions for every element, you just need to read them.
Sure, I understand the value of reading. However, sometimes a presenter showing a live demo will wiggle the mouse cursor around certain options on the screen to emphasize particular things or clarify what may be confusing with a list of check boxes. ("You want to click this; you don't want to click that.") Or maybe demonstrate clicking on a setting and then immediately show the system dashboard statistics changing in realtime as a response. That combination of dynamic "spatial"+"time" to convey technical information is the value of live demos over reading man pages.
The videos are not replacements for concise reference texts but a supplementary teaching tool.
Here's an example of a video demonstrating high interaction with tools that would be very cumbersome to put into text:
Lots of of mouse of movement to guide where the eye should look. Lots of scrolling and zooming. Voice annotation that's synchronized with the screen data that's constantly changing. It wouldn't translate well to text. Even if one manually created an accurate text transcript of that talk, all the missing visual cues would inhibit learning how to "drive" the tool like a car. Transcripts are only a reasonable substitute for some types of tech talks.
Or an edited transcript, with the source code samples copied inline and perhaps a bit more detail than someone would say out loud? Hang on, maybe we could put multiple talks about closely related subjects together with headings to separate them! Then have some sort of table of the subjects at the beginning to make them easy to find - a table of the 'contents' so to speak.
This is a brilliant idea, I'm going to file my patent application now.
Youtube Playback Speed Control Extension works well here... and I can watch it im my comfort zone of 3.5x - 4.5x. So at least 45min get cut to 10-15min..
but tested only on one so far.
For Youtube (and most others) I usually just paste the URL to `mpv` (using youtube-dl under the hood) to take advantage of it's keyboard shortcuts for easy control over speed and position etc.
I might be playing through a video really fast, but suddenly need to repeat something so hit backspace to drop to normal speed, a press or two of left arrow to jump back (~5 secs each), then tap ] a few times to speed up again. Then if there's an interesting chart or graph shown, just f to toggle full screen, s for screenshot if you like.
Being able to navigate and control linear media with simple keyboard shortcuts feels liberating in a similar way to the first time you grok a powerful edit with just a few keystrokes in Vim or Emacs (except you're just consuming media of course).
Nicely done, I've always heard that we can listen about 4x faster than we can speak. Most podcast listeners I know do 1.5x - 2x speed, myself included.
I have experience with and equipment for transcription. If this site had the feature to add transcriptions, I would like to transcribe maybe one or two videos per week and I don't think I'm the only one who would. It would be a nice easy way to give back and possibly even garner some reputation/goodwill.
The two most important pieces are a high-quality head-set and a foot-pedal to rewind/fast-forward. After that, a good ergonomic keyboard is very helpful. That's the bulk of it, but you can find other ways to spend money such as specialized software and hardware.
They are allowed to exist by YouTube, provided they don't affect Google in a negative way.
There are constant discussions in the tech community about how we keep the internet free and usable by all. We (developers) should be leading by example and creating services that don't rely on permission from large corporations to operate. Especially when those services are about distributing knowledge.
Claim 1: Google will shut down video aggregation and hosting sites
Counterclaim 1: But what about x, y and z that exist parallel to Youtube?
Claim 2: Those are allowed to exist by Google.
I dont disagree with your overarching point, it just seem like your arguing it in a flawed manner without any real evidence of your claim occurring or explaining why there are other sites that provide similar functionality without being affected by Google?
>We (developers) should be leading by example and creating services that don't rely on permission from large corporations to operate.
Great so that is what the original poster is doing? And your already claiming that Google is going to shut this down. Seems kinda alarmist.
It is alarmist for sure, we absolutely should be alarmed at how little control over content end users have.
YouTube specific examples are hard to come by, but here's something related to how they control their API from wikipedia: "YouTube also does not allow videos to run whilst the Android device is sleeping. This can be seen as an annoyance for some users. Particularly if the user is trying to use YouTube as a replacement music player.[13]"
When you look at the reference for that quote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGoVol6ujHk You get "This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated."
Presumably that original use case was outside of their terms, but why? It's not to help users, it's because it infringes on Google Music and their Ad Partners will not be happy if people are listening to ads instead of watching them. If google could get away with monitoring your phone to check you're watching the ads they put up, I'm sure they would because they could charge 3x the price for them.
If we look at other similar companies that have offered APIs for developers to use in the past we actually do find lots of examples of services that already existing being shut down:
So yes, these apps are only allowed to exist while Google allows it, if there's a squeeze at google they will get shut down. There is no reason not to use different tech given the options we have available today if we want to protect content and respect our users.
I really like the idea of dev-related video portal. However, I'm running into key UI/UX issues on this website -- poor design and usability makes it very difficult to use the site. Hopefully, we'll see more iteration over time. Some suggestions that might be helpful:
* Is there an option to sort the videos based on date? Or filters? I don't really want to see older video from 2014, as some are really outdated videos.
* The title of video is really hard to read, when it's white text (all upper-case) on light blue background. I really really had hard time distinguishing one video from another. Also fonts used on the titles are the similar to meta-data, so it's really hard to find the title of each video.
* Is there a special reason why thumbnails dithered? It makes it hard to see them. If you don't want it to stand out, perhaps lower the saturation,... but dithered thumbnails are really an eye-sore.
* As someone had mentioned, having a "watch" button is a really poor choice, especially on mobile device, where button is really tiny and hard to press.
* Language tag should be disabled, until it has been fixed or made accurate. I see hundreds of videos, yet only few are actually tagged as English.
* The dimension of playing video is small; in fact, it's as big as the size of the thumbnails of related videos. Please make the video bigger.
You can just use Google Videos Search for that - type the interesting topic e.g. "machine learning" and set the date & length filter. No need for a dedicated website.
Searching for "rust" returns "Google Python Class Day 1 Part 1", "Make CSS Your Secret Super Drawing Tool", "Visualizing a Decision Tree - Machine Learning Recipes #2", etc.
https://awesometalks.party is a million times better than this site. It's curated, so you don't have to sort through thousands of talks to find the interesting ones - it's only the interesting ones. Also it has a night mode!
https://awesometalks.party is great if you want talks about web-related topics, but there isn't much else (eg there are no talks on C++ or Java, or modern game development, or big data, etc there..). There's definitely room for another dev talks website that covers more subjects.
That's because not enough people have submitted good talks about other topics yet! If you know any, click the "Add a talk" button in the top right and suggest them!
Since he embedd youtube videos like a "youtube service" i'm not sure the logo is the biggest issue here? Or are you allowed to do that? Make a new youtube front?
I'm pretty sure you can embed/aggregate youtube videos, as long as the author allows it, anyway you want. Youtube still makes money off any ads that show up in the video, why do they care where/how people get to the videos, as long as it's still showing advertising? The logo though, could possibly be too similar to youtube's and cause some issues.
Fantastic idea. Last month I've been thinking of creating a list of tech videos shorter than 15 minutes (so it will be only 10 minutes when I play with 1.5 speed) as (from my point of view) it would be easy to watch in a break or commute without losing the attention span :)
If you can add this feature in the filters (filter by duration) it would be great!
An example would be:
<10 minutes
<20 minutes
<30 minutes
Youtube does not have this feature rather they only have short (<4 minutes) and long (>20 minutes)
I appreciate the effort, but I dislike the interface very much because it is anti-web.
If you're going through the trouble of developing a JavaScript-enabled interface, is it really that hard to work with the History API to provide friendly URLs?
Thanks for raising this. Many links are shareable and history-API friendly – e.g. direct video links, speaker links. (e.g. dev.tube/@eduardsi). Internal site-search is not History API friendly, though.
Any hints which parts of the product need better history support? Submit issue/feature request here:
Search and filtering via tags is very important to be URL friendly, because people like me can then add it as a "search engine" via a keyword in Firefox or Chrome.
It's also the thing that bothers me about Pocket (getpocket.com), the fact that I can't add it as a search provider.
I'm working on a similar project on the side [1]. It's not only videos, but also slides altogether. The project UI is even more lacking than the one from OP. It's also mostly web related. I'm working on making it more diverse (currently I can only spend few hours per week on it). There is a small cherry on top: you can access this data via a GraphQL endpoint.
Nice idea, your site a good start but I have a few small recommendations.
* I would like to see the recorded date a little more prominent.
* It would be very nice to show the talk description in the search result rather then having to click "watch" to read it.
* I don't care how many views the video had but I do care about the number of comments and likes.
Might be cool to have a comment section that allows for snippets of code much like StackOverflow. I could see this becoming a platform with a lot of tutorials and being able to hash out the code from the video in a comment section and get answers like StackOverflow could provide a ton of value.
Algolia pricing page is intentionally misleading - there is a free "community" tier that has to display "search by algolia", but is otherwise free to use.
Could you reference what part of the ToS they're in violation of? I've got a site that does similar and when I had a look through I couldn't find anything that might put me in hot water
Is that the correct section? When I click on that, there is no section 5 E, only A, B, C and D. The heading on section 5 here is "5. Your Use of Content".
Edit: It seems to be allowed here. Section 4 E ii, note the double negative in 4 E:
4. General Use of the Service—Permissions and Restrictions
E. Prohibited commercial uses do not include:
* showing YouTube videos through the Embeddable Player on an ad-enabled blog or website, subject to the advertising restrictions set forth above in Section 4.D
Fascinating, thank you. I get completely different terms and conditions when I click on the same link - it includes the text you posted under section 4 D instead, but then adds a clause E specifically allowing use of the Embeddable Player on sites with ads:
A good way to get around that, and monetize the site would maybe be simply throw up some optin forms/subscribe mechanisms. Build a mailing list, then advertise via newsletter. That'd probably be how I'd monetize the site. That way there'd be no ads on-site, but it could still be commercialized via email.
Hey looks great! I made something very similar https://talkery.io, shoot me a message if you guys need any advice/want some help in getting new videos etc, I'd be happy to help!
It's cross-discipline dev related. Vimeo support is coming soon. If you have a good game dev YouTube channel to contribute – that would be great! https://github.com/watch-devtube/contrib
do you really watch these videos? It seems that video is a reallly bad format for such technical information. Much better would be plain text; or, if you want to be fancy, user-editable code snippets.
Some people find it more engaging to learn this way. I recently went through some videos on how OAuth2 works which I found very useful. I would likely find learning how OAuth2 works by reading the documentation extremely dull.
Hi! Thanks for raising this. Please submit an issue (https://github.com/watch-devtube/web), so we can fix it. In the meantime, cannot reproduce (Mac, Chrome Desktop 66.0) :(
Thanks, I just watched the talk on "learning functional programming in javascript", which I enjoyed. 750k views which is surprisingly high for a javascript talk.
Is it the speaker? She's charming and all... but 750k views? I wonder if that's because masses of developers are not happy with object oriented approaches in JS (count me in that crowd) and looking for a better way.
there should be a video aggregation service (ironically like a google for video) that'll link/embed videos but also allow for content creation uploading to multiple other video services.
youtube is in decline but it's not happening soon, some videos will disappear from youtube and we still need to save them somehow.
Their unfair treatment of content creators who are less liked by advertisers, as well as their draconian rules instituted recently, as well as changes to the algorithms used to select recommendations, and subscription notification delays have all conflagrated into a massive clusterfuck for many small channels of niche content (where, imho, is the true value of youtube).
I have no doubt that unless this changes, a new competitor that can get enough network effect can eat youtube's lunch...
