Invideo for YouTube is a browser extension for Google Chrome that adds video text search options to the video streaming website.

While you can use the search on YouTube to find videos, search results are limited to matching video titles, descriptions and other data that is entered when a video is uploaded to the site.

The search does not take into account any audio that is part of the video, even if subtitles or closed captions are provided.

The ability to search inside YouTube videos can be quite handy at times: to skip straight ahead for instance, or to check out all parts of the video that match the entered search term.

YouTube Video Text Search

Invideo for YouTube adds video text search capabilities to YouTube. The extension is available for Google Chrome, and works only on the new version of YouTube currently.

The extension should work in other Chromium-based browsers -- Opera and Vivaldi for instance -- as well, and may also work in Firefox.

The extension works in the following way:

It displays an "Open Invideo" button underneath the video on YouTube if it is available. If it is not, you get a "cannot transcribe this video" notification in the same spot instead. A click on the button opens a search field, and all text of the video. You may enter a search term to filter the text, so that only parts of the video that match what you are looking for are listed. A click on any line jumps directly to it.

The extension creates a tag cloud as well which you may switch to by clicking on the keywords button. It displays tags using different sizes to highlight the most frequently used words of the video.

So, how good is the search? It depends a lot on whether video transcripts are available or not. I ran a quick test on a few dozen videos and the result was that Invideo for YouTube worked on most videos I played on YouTube after installing the extension.

It worked well on most video types but failed for most music videos for instance. It did fail quite often when I played non-English videos but I'm not sure if that is caused by the extension, or by YouTube failing to detect and auto-generate the transcription.

Closing Words

Invideo for YouTube adds text search options to YouTube that finds video text when you run it. It needs a bit more of work to reduce the number of videos for which it does not work though.

Summary Author Rating 2.5 based on 2 votes Software Name Invideo for YouTube Software Category Browser Landing Page https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/invideo-for-youtube/iacbjlffnpbhgkgknabhkfmlcpdcigab?hl=en

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