SubSearcher

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  Default Page

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  Searching for the term "the"

Inspiration

We were frustrated by having to scrub through an hour long lecture on YouTube just to find a specific topic. It felt very inefficient and we were surprised there wasn't a better way to search captions.

What it does

It allows you to search YouTube videos for text in closed captions and then navigate to those sections of the video. Also, it allows you to search complicated queries via regex!

How we built it

It is a chrome extension written in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to use the official YouTube API. We could get the list of the available captions on a video. Unfortunately, to get the specific captions, the YouTube API restricted this functionality to only videos where the creator of the captions specifically allowed users to download the captions through the API, which pretty much affects all videos. We pivoted to scraping captions off the YouTube page.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We mostly finished this project despite pivoting between a lot of different projects and wasting time.

What we learned

Don't make things that make things harder.

What's next for SubSearcher

Adding functionality to all video sites and not just YouTube.

Built With

• chrome
• javascript
• regex