// the find
zarazhangrui/youtube-digest
Turn YouTube videos into deep learning resources with transcripts, bilingual translation, AI overviews, explanations, and notes. Bring your own keys.
A Chrome side-panel extension that pulls YouTube transcripts via Supadata and feeds them to DeepSeek for bilingual translation, AI overviews, and timestamped notes. It's a bring-your-own-key, no-backend tool aimed at people studying a language or dense technical talks on YouTube, not casual viewers.
No build step — plain manifest v3 JS/HTML/CSS, which actually matters here since the whole install/remix flow is designed around a coding agent reading and patching the source directly. Transcript translation is batched and cached rather than firing one giant request, which keeps DeepSeek costs down and is reflected in the README's own token-cost math. There's a real test suite (seven test files covering UI state, transcript search/selection, translation, settings) plus a CI workflow, which is more discipline than most single-maintainer browser extensions bother with.
It's permanently stuck in 'Load unpacked' land — not on the Chrome Web Store, so no auto-updates, and moving the folder silently breaks the extension until you reload it. Both the transcript source and the AI provider are hardcoded (Supadata mode=native only, DeepSeek V4 Flash only); there's no fallback when native captions don't exist, it just fails. The repo explicitly states upstream issues and PRs aren't accepted — it's a fork-it-yourself template, not a maintained project, so any bug you hit is yours to fix. Chrome-only (116+), nothing for Firefox or Safari.