Studying from YouTube Videos

A huge amount of useful material lives on YouTube — recorded conference talks, product walkthroughs, certification prep, recorded lectures. Paste a link and Scholarly reads the video's transcript, saves it as a source in your library, and lets you build from it like any other upload.

Where to Paste a Link

• Add content dialog -- Open Add content (from Home or the New menu), stay on the Upload tab, and paste the link into the Or paste a link field. It accepts YouTube videos, websites, and PDF links — click Add URL to queue it.
• Any AI create modal -- The upload tab in every create flow (flashcards, quizzes, podcasts, video lectures, and the rest) has the same link field, so you can go straight from a YouTube URL to a finished deck in one dialog.

You can mix a YouTube link with other sources in the same batch — pair the lecture video with the professor's slides PDF and generate from both together.

What You Can Build

Once the video is added, choose what to make:

• Flashcards and practice quizzes
• AI Video Lectures — a fresh narrated lecture built from the video's content
• AI Podcasts
• Study guides, summaries, worksheets, and outlines
• AI Slides, mind maps, infographics, timelines, and more

Watching the Video in Scholarly

The video also gets its own page in your library, built for studying rather than just watching:

• Chapters -- Jump between sections of the video.
• Transcript -- Read along, and click any line to seek to that moment.
• Summary -- An AI summary of the whole video.
• Flashcards -- Create a deck from the video without leaving the page; a linked deck stays attached to the video.
• AI Chat -- The chat panel on the video page already knows the video, so you can ask "what did they say about X?" and get grounded answers.
• Interactive questions -- Quick check-in questions appear while you watch, with a toggle to turn them off. See Interactive Video Questions.

How Transcripts Are Used

Scholarly works from the video's transcript, so everything it generates is grounded in what's actually said — not a guess based on the title. Long videos are fine: multi-hour recordings work too.

When a Transcript Isn't Available Yet

A link that doesn't come back with a transcript gets a specific message, not one generic dead end:

• Still being transcribed — the video is added to your library right away and the transcript finishes on the video's own page. Ask again shortly.
• Deleted, private, or blocked in your region — the video can't be read. Use a different link.
• Still live streaming — wait until the stream has ended, then add the link again.
• No captions at all — upload the audio or video file directly instead.
• A temporary problem on the transcript service — try again in a moment.

Chat says the same thing: ask about a linked video whose transcript is still running and it tells you it is still processing and suggests asking again, rather than failing the lookup.

Tips

• Talks and explainers work best. Talk-heavy videos give the AI the most to work with; music videos or footage with little speech won't produce useful material.
• One topic per generation. For a long playlist, add videos individually and generate per video (or group them in a folder) rather than mashing unrelated topics into one deck.
• Combine formats. A recorded talk plus the matching slide deck or handbook chapter as sources gives noticeably better flashcards than either alone.

Plan Notes

• Adding a YouTube link counts toward your plan's upload allowance, the same as uploading a file.
• Generating study material from a video uses an AI Creation Credit, like any other source. See Plans and Limits.

Related

• Uploading Content — all the ways to bring material into Scholarly.
• Transcription — turning a video into a downloadable .txt or .vtt transcript file.
• Paste Text — for when you have the transcript as text instead of a link.
• AI Chat — asking questions about anything in your library.