YouTube and video

Paper handles three kinds of video sources: YouTube URLs, video files you upload, and streaming links captured from university platforms.

Add a YouTube video

Transcribing audio when no captions exist takes longer for long videos - expect a few minutes for a one-hour lecture.

Click + Add source → Upload a file and pick a video.
Files up to 500 MB are accepted. Common formats work (.mp4, .webm, .mov, .m4v).
The file uploads directly to storage, then the server extracts the audio with ffmpeg and transcribes it.

Read the transcript alongside the player - click any line to jump to that timestamp.
Auto-generated chapters divide the video into topic sections with short summaries.
Summarise, generate flashcards, or build a quiz from the content.
Chat with citations linking back to the timestamp the answer came from.

Recorded lectures often have weak audio. Edit lines in the transcript if they come through wrong - chat and other features pick up corrections.
For a series of lectures, add each as its own source in the same page. Chat will reason across all of them.
Use "summarise lecture 4" style prompts when the page has multiple videos.

The Paper Chrome extension detects videos on common university platforms and hands them off to the right importer:

HLS streams (Panopto, Kaltura, most Moodle players) are captured as an .m3u8 manifest and transcribed from the live stream.
Echo360 splits video and audio into separate tracks - Paper muxes them together first, then transcribes. Both parts happen in the background and you'll be redirected to the page as soon as it's created.
Vimeo and other direct players are pulled with yt-dlp on the server.

If the platform requires login and the extension can't see the media, download a copy from the platform and upload it as a video file instead.

Paper handles three kinds of video sources: YouTube URLs, video files you upload, and streaming links captured from university platforms.

Transcribing audio when no captions exist takes longer for long videos - expect a few minutes for a one-hour lecture.

Click + Add source → Upload a file and pick a video.
Files up to 500 MB are accepted. Common formats work (.mp4, .webm, .mov, .m4v).
The file uploads directly to storage, then the server extracts the audio with ffmpeg and transcribes it.

Read the transcript alongside the player - click any line to jump to that timestamp.
Auto-generated chapters divide the video into topic sections with short summaries.
Summarise, generate flashcards, or build a quiz from the content.
Chat with citations linking back to the timestamp the answer came from.

Recorded lectures often have weak audio. Edit lines in the transcript if they come through wrong - chat and other features pick up corrections.
For a series of lectures, add each as its own source in the same page. Chat will reason across all of them.
Use "summarise lecture 4" style prompts when the page has multiple videos.

The Paper Chrome extension detects videos on common university platforms and hands them off to the right importer:

HLS streams (Panopto, Kaltura, most Moodle players) are captured as an .m3u8 manifest and transcribed from the live stream.
Echo360 splits video and audio into separate tracks - Paper muxes them together first, then transcribes. Both parts happen in the background and you'll be redirected to the page as soon as it's created.
Vimeo and other direct players are pulled with yt-dlp on the server.

If the platform requires login and the extension can't see the media, download a copy from the platform and upload it as a video file instead.