When you’re watching a video online, these free apps take time-stamped notes to remember the exact point where you needed to remember something.
When you're watching a video online, take time-stamped notes to remember the exact point where you needed to remember something. These are the best free apps to do that.
You can now take full college courses online, and learn incredible skills for free on YouTube and other video channels. So why take notes with a pen and paper? Online video deserves note-taking apps built for it, which automatically sync with the video to time-stamp the notes, and allow for things like screenshots, shared notes, and exporting to PDFs or your favorite note-taking app.
Those looking for a way to take time-stamped notes while watching YouTube videos need to check out Transnote as your first option. It's free, lightweight, and unobtrusive, as well as being really simple for an average person to use.
Once you install the extension, you'll see a floating bubble at the bottom-right corner of every YouTube tab (which you can disable in settings). Click it to open the Transnote widget within that tab. First time users will need to register for an account, which is essential to save all your notes for later.
Click the "Add a timestamp" button to automatically pause the video at its current location and start typing a note. You can choose to keep the video playing in the background while you write your notes as well. Add tags to sort your notes, if desired. Transnote features a robust full-text search engine to find any note in a jiffy.
Transnote mentions clearly on their website that the extension is free, and will remain free forever. While using it, we didn't experience any ads either, but there's no promise of it being ad-free forever.
Download: Transnote for Chrome (Free)
Transnote is ideal for those who want simplicity, and similarly, TubersLab is ideal for those who want robust features in their time-stamped notes for YouTube. Again, it's a completely free app, with no ads in our usage.
Once you install and register, you will find a notepad area next to every video you open in YouTube (pushing down the "recommended videos" column). TubersLab has a lot of smart features to make note-taking easy, such as:
Apart from these stellar features, TubersLab also has companion mobile apps to install on your phone. Here, you'll see all the videos you have saved, and play them on your phone. The phone app also lets you take notes and add screenshots, but it's not as intuitive as the browser extension. Still, having your notes with you everywhere you go is a great bonus.
Download: TubersLab extension for Chrome | Firefox (Free)
Download: TubersLab app for Android | iOS (Free)
YiNote is an exceptional browser-based notepad for those who want time-stamped notes on videos. It works with any HTML5 video on the internet, which we verified by testing it with the best online learning platforms like Coursera and Lynda. And not only does it support YouTube, but also works with embedded YouTube videos on other sites, which very few such notepad extensions can do.
Formerly known as TurboNote, YiNote is completely free. On the face of it, it's a simple notepad, where you summon the widget and write notes that are automatically time-stamped. You can then search through these notes at any time with the built-in full-text search. But there are a few neat tricks under YiNote's surface that make it special.
For starters, YiNote automatically takes a screenshot of every note you write. You'll see these screenshots only when you open the YiNote Management Page, where you can also annotate the screenshots within the app. Plus, you can then generate a PDF with all the screenshots and annotations, to share with others.
The extension also supports MarkDown language, so you can add simple text formatting while writing your notes. You can then export these notes to Evernote, Google Docs, or OneNote in a click of a button, for easier sharing and collaboration with others. It's a tremendously useful way to take notes while watching online learning videos.
Download: YiNote for Chrome | Firefox | Edge (Free)
Of all the time-stamped notepad apps we tried, Video Notebook officially supports the largest number of websites for online courses. You can use the extension seamlessly with Udemy, Coursera, SkillShare, Udacity, Khan Academy, EdX, PluralSight, Panopto, YouTube, and Vimeo. So if you use multiple online learning platforms but want a single notebook for all your notes, you can't go wrong with this app.
It is as easy as any other app to create time-stamped notes and highlights in any video that you're watching, with simple keyboard shortcuts. You can also move the Video Notebook pad to any part of the window. But where the extension excels is in screenshots. When you take a time-stamped screenshot, you can also quickly annotate it within the floating app window, so you remember why that screenshot is important.
Video Notebook also works with Google Meet and Zoom, offering a range of options to take notes for online video meetings, and it syncs with recorded meetings too. If you switch on captions, it will automatically record those captions and make them searchable with your notes. It can smartly detect presentations to take better screenshots of slides.
Download: Video Notebook for Chrome (Free)
Reclipped is perhaps the most powerful extension for taking notes on online videos. It takes a little while to get accustomed to, but if you're someone who relies heavily on taking notes while watching videos, you'll be glad you learnt to use this tool.
The extension features a range of keyboard shortcuts to open and close the sidebar widget, create a time-stamped note, create a time-stamped highlight without a note, and create a time-stamped snapshot of the video. Within the note-taking window, you can also create bulleted time-stamped notes, and fast-forward or rewind the video. You can also create a snippet (setting a start and end time within the video) with a note.
All of this is possible with keyboard shortcuts so that note-taking is easier. But in a surprising addition, Reclipped also allows users to dictate voice notes for those times when you don't want to use the keyboard.
When you're reviewing your video later, you'll see all your notes in the sidebar, along with a timeline under the video itself. This timeline shows every point where you've taken some note, which you can mouse over to see a preview.
Notes can be set as private or public. If you enter a video URL in the main Reclipped website, you'll see all public notes taken by others for that video, which is excellent for shared classes.
Reclipped also works with a variety of sites, such as YouTube, PrimeVideo, Disney Hotstar, Vimeo, Twitch.tv, LinkedIn Learning, BiliBili, Ted, Brightstorm, CuriosityStream, SkillShare, Panopto, Google Drive, OneDrive, and Dropbox. It's unfortunately missing some leading online course platforms, but let's hope those will be added soon.
You can also use Reclipped with offline videos stored on your computer. This can be a nifty tool for taking notes while reviewing your saved video calls.
Download: Reclipped for Chrome (Free)
These extensions will help you write better notes with time-stamps, which make it easy when you want to refer to them later. But that isn't a substitute for the basics of good note-taking. You should still review your notes and summarize them, as it's key to learning and retention.
Remembering what you consume online can be difficult. Use these free modern highlighter apps to annotate text, videos, and podcasts.
Mihir Patkar has been writing on technology and productivity for over 14 years at some of the top media publications across the world. He has an academic background in journalism.
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