Have you ever needed to find a particular passage from a movie, a tutorial or more generally from a YouTube video? Personally, in my music band where I play bass and take care of the samples, I sometimes have to look for a specific quote in a video on the web to sample it. And when the video is long (like in the case of a movie), it’s not necessarily easy… As much as it’s easy to search in text (with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + F for example), for videos, the task is more difficult.
I recently discovered on an English-speaking website (https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/search-within-youtube-video/) an extension for the Google Chrome browser that allows you to search for text in a video published on YouTube.
Search for Text in A YouTube Video with Invideo For YouTube
Invideo For YouTube is an extension for Google’s browser – Google Chrome, which adds to Google Chrome a functionality to search for text inside a YouTube video.
How does Invideo For YouTube work?
YouTube is Google’s video platform that has advanced features like video subtitling. The Invideo For YouTube plugin allows you to search in the subtitles of a YouTube video. It allows you to directly find a quote, a specific passage of a YouTube video. Google’s tool is not perfect, it is notably of better quality for videos in English and does not support all alphabets (only the Latin alphabet). So Invideo For YouTubeuses the automatic subtitles generated by Google and the recovered text is sometimes approximate. But according to my tests, the search results are quite satisfactory.
Of course, you need to be able to play the original YouTube video to use the extension. If this is not the case, you can follow our tutorial on how to unblock a YouTube video.
How to Find A Specific Part of a Video
Now let’s get practical with the search for a famous quote from the movie The Great Diversion, American Class, a French comedy film from the 1990s by Michel Hazanavicius and Dominique Mézerette. I would like to find a passage from the YouTube video of this film from which this "famous" quote is extracted:
We’re going to eat… chips! Do you hear?!? Chips! Is that all it takes to make you feel good when I tell you we’re going to eat chips? But what’s happening to you? Why don’t you say something, are you sulking or what?
Follow the steps in this tutorial to find the exact passage you are looking for in a YouTube video.
- Open Google Chrome and go to this URL address to download the extension: . Then click on the Add to Chrome button to install the Invideo For Youtube extension.
- In Chrome, open the YouTube video where you want to do a text search and then click the Open Invideo button.
- A search box will appear, just type in the quote or phrase you want to search in the YouTube video. Click on one of the results to go directly to the passage you are looking for.
And that’s it!