ZapNotes — YouTube Notes, Chapters & Transcript to Markdown

About

Stop scrubbing back through videos to find "that part". VidNotes turns any YouTube video into a clean, linked Markdown document — your notes, the video's chapters, and the transcript, each line linked to the exact second it refers to.

HOW IT WORKS

1. Watch a video. Press Alt+Shift+N the moment something matters — the toolbar badge counts your captures, and you never leave the video.
2. Open the popup to write or edit your notes. Each one is pinned to its timestamp.
3. Click "Copy Markdown" or "Download .md". Pick what to include: your notes, the video's chapters, the transcript.

The result pastes perfectly into Notion, Obsidian, Logseq, or any Markdown editor. Every timestamp is a working YouTube link that jumps straight to that second.

WHO IT'S FOR

- Students turning lectures into revision notes
- Researchers referencing talks and interviews with precise citations
- Content creators logging moments to clip or quote later

FEATURES

- One-key capture (Alt+Shift+N, remappable in chrome://extensions/shortcuts)
- Notes persist per video — reload or come back next week, they're still there
- Chapter export from the video's description
- Transcript export with language selection, marked when auto-generated (best effort — YouTube offers no official transcript API, so on rare videos this may be unavailable; your notes and chapters always export)
- Clean, Notion-ready Markdown with clickable timestamps
- Free. No account, no sign-up, no paywall.

PRIVATE BY DESIGN

- Your notes are stored locally in your browser. They never leave it.
- The extension makes zero external requests and contains no analytics or tracking.
- No account of any kind.

SINGLE PURPOSE

This extension does one thing: capture timestamped notes on YouTube videos and export them (with chapters and transcript) to Markdown.

PERMISSIONS EXPLAINED

- "storage" — saves your notes locally, per video.
- Access to youtube.com — required to read the video's title, current time, chapters and captions on the page you're watching. The extension reads the page; it never modifies YouTube's interface.