🎓 NoteWise

Convert YouTube videos and playlists into comprehensive AI-powered study notes — from your terminal.

Why NoteWise? · Quick Start · Features · Installation · Configuration · Providers · Contributing

💡 Why 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.

The idea is simple: your time watching a video is valuable. The notes that should come from it — the structured, searchable, reviewable kind — shouldn't require an extra hour of your day. NoteWise automates exactly that step. 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.

Where it shines:

• 📚 Students catching up on lecture recordings or supplementing textbooks with YouTube explanations
• 🧑‍💻 Developers staying on top of conference talks, tutorials, and technical deep-dives without watching at 3x speed
• 🌍 Language learners extracting structured notes from native-language content
• 📋 Researchers quickly distilling hours of talks into organized, searchable reference material
• 🏢 Teams turning internal video presentations into shareable written documentation

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.

✨ Features

📹 Single Video, Playlists & 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

🚀 Quick Start

1 · Install

uv tool install notewise

Or with pipx:

pipx install notewise

For standalone binaries with checksum verification and PATH setup:

curl -fsSL https://github.com/whoisjayd/notewise/releases/latest/download/install.sh | sh

2 · Configure

Run the interactive setup wizard once to store your LLM API key:

notewise setup

This creates ~/.notewise/config.env. The default model is Gemini 2.5 Flash — grab a free key at aistudio.google.com.

3 · Generate Study Notes

# Single video
notewise process "https://youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID"

# Full playlist
notewise process "https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAYLIST_ID"

# Batch file (one URL per line)
notewise process my-course-urls.txt -o ./course-notes

Notes are written as Markdown files in ./output/ (or your configured directory).

📦 Installation

Requirements

• Python 3.10 or newer (3.10, 3.11, 3.12, and 3.13 are tested in CI)
• An API key for at least one supported LLM provider

uv (recommended)

uv tool install notewise

pipx

pipx install notewise

pip

pip install notewise

uv tool install and pipx install are the best choices when you want notewise available from anywhere on your system PATH. Plain pip install installs the CLI into the active Python environment.

Standalone Binary Installer

curl -fsSL https://github.com/whoisjayd/notewise/releases/latest/download/install.sh | sh

On Windows:

irm https://github.com/whoisjayd/notewise/releases/latest/download/install.ps1 | iex

Both installer scripts verify SHA256SUMS.txt, install the release binary, and update your user-level PATH.

Docker

docker pull ghcr.io/whoisjayd/notewise:latest

docker run --rm \
  -e GEMINI_API_KEY="your_key" \
  -v "$(pwd)/output:/output" \
  ghcr.io/whoisjayd/notewise:latest \
  process "https://youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID"

Development Install

git clone https://github.com/whoisjayd/notewise
cd notewise
uv sync --dev

Updating

Check for a newer release and print the recommended upgrade command for your install:

notewise update

⚙️ Configuration

notewise reads configuration from ~/.notewise/config.env (created by notewise setup). Environment variables always take precedence over the config file.

Key Settings

Key	Default	Description
DEFAULT_MODEL	gemini/gemini-2.5-flash	LiteLLM-format model string
OUTPUT_DIR	./output	Where study notes are saved
TEMPERATURE	0.7	LLM sampling temperature (0.0–1.0)
MAX_TOKENS	(model default)	Max tokens per LLM response
MAX_CONCURRENT_VIDEOS	5	Parallel video processing limit
YOUTUBE_REQUESTS_PER_MINUTE	10	YouTube request rate limit
YOUTUBE_COOKIE_FILE	(none)	Path to Netscape cookies file

Override any setting per-run via CLI flags — run notewise process --help for all options.

State Directory

All persistent state (config, cache, logs) lives in ~/.notewise/ by default. Override with:

export NOTEWISE_HOME=/path/to/custom/dir

🤖 Supported Providers

notewise uses LiteLLM — any model string LiteLLM supports works here.

Provider	Config Key	Example Model String
Google Gemini	GEMINI_API_KEY	gemini/gemini-2.5-flash
OpenAI	OPENAI_API_KEY	gpt-4o
Anthropic	ANTHROPIC_API_KEY	claude-3-5-sonnet-20241022
Groq	GROQ_API_KEY	groq/llama3-70b-8192
xAI	XAI_API_KEY	xai/grok-2
Mistral	MISTRAL_API_KEY	mistral/mistral-large-latest
Cohere	COHERE_API_KEY	command-r-plus
DeepSeek	DEEPSEEK_API_KEY	deepseek/deepseek-chat

Use any provider with --model:

notewise process "URL" --model claude-3-5-sonnet-20241022

🖥️ CLI Reference

notewise [COMMAND] [OPTIONS]

Command	Description
process <url>	Generate study notes from a video, playlist, or batch file
setup	Run the interactive configuration wizard
config	Display the current configuration (secrets masked)
stats	Show aggregate processing statistics
history	List recently processed videos
info [url]	Inspect a YouTube source or show runtime info
doctor	Run a health check on config, cache, and logs
edit-config	Open the config file in your editor
cache	Manage the local SQLite cache
logs	Inspect and manage session log files
update	Check for a newer release and print upgrade commands
version	Print the installed version

process Options

notewise process URL [OPTIONS]

  -m, --model TEXT           LLM model (overrides config)
  -o, --output PATH          Output directory (overrides config)
  -l, --language TEXT        Preferred transcript language (repeatable)
  -t, --temperature FLOAT    LLM temperature 0.0–1.0
  -k, --max-tokens INT       Max tokens per LLM response
  -F, --force                Re-process already-processed videos
      --no-ui                Plain stdout output (CI/cron friendly)
      --quiz                 Also generate a multiple-choice quiz
      --export-transcript    Export raw transcript: txt or json
      --cookie-file PATH     Netscape cookies file for private videos

📂 Output Structure

output/
├── Video Title/
│   ├── study_notes.md           # Full study notes
│   ├── quiz.md                  # (optional, --quiz)
│   └── transcript.txt           # (optional, --export-transcript txt)
└── Another Video Title/
    └── study_notes.md

For chapter-aware videos (>1 hour with chapters), notes are split by chapter:

output/
└── Long Course Title/
    ├── Chapter 01 - Introduction.md
    ├── Chapter 02 - Core Concepts.md
    └── ...

🐳 Docker

The image is published to GHCR on every release:

docker run --rm \
  -e GEMINI_API_KEY="your_key" \
  -v "$(pwd)/output:/output" \
  ghcr.io/whoisjayd/notewise:latest \
  process "https://youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID" --no-ui

Mount /output to access generated files on the host. The container runs as a non-root user (uid 1001).

🛠️ Development

# Clone & install
git clone https://github.com/whoisjayd/notewise
cd notewise
uv sync --dev

# Run tests
make test

# Lint, format, type-check
make quality

# Full CI pipeline locally
make ci

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the complete contributor guide.

📋 Changelog

See GitHub Releases for the full history.

📄 License

MIT with Attribution — free to use, modify, and distribute. If you use notewise in a project or build on top of it, you are required to include credit and a link back to this repository. See LICENSE for the full terms.

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please read CONTRIBUTING.md to get started.

Found a bug? Open an issue. Have a security concern? See SECURITY.md.

🙏 Thank You

notewise is built on top of a great open-source ecosystem, and this project is deeply grateful to the maintainers behind those tools and libraries.

See GRATITUDE.md for full acknowledgements.

And most importantly — thank you to everyone who has used notewise, filed issues, suggested features, or contributed code. Every star, bug report, and PR makes this better.

If notewise helped you study smarter, learn faster, or just saved you some time — that's exactly why it was built. ⭐

_{Built with ❤️ by whoisjayd
If you use notewise, please give credit — it takes two seconds and means a lot.}