Guide

Get YouTube videos into Obsidian as clean notes

Sumvid turns a YouTube video into an Obsidian-ready note in three steps: summarize the video on Sumvid, click "Copy for Obsidian" in the share menu, and paste the result into a note in your vault. What lands in your clipboard is plain markdown with YAML frontmatter and clickable timestamps — no plugin, no manual reformatting, no watching the video first.

How it works

Three steps

  1. 1. Summarize the video. Paste the YouTube URL into Sumvid and sign in — Sumvid pulls the transcript and returns a clean, sectioned summary in about a minute.
  2. 2. Click "Copy for Obsidian." Open the share menu on the finished summary and choose "Copy for Obsidian" — this copies the summary as markdown with YAML frontmatter already attached.
  3. 3. Paste into your vault. Create a note in Obsidian and paste. The frontmatter populates Obsidian's properties pane immediately; the body is ready to read, link, and search alongside the rest of your notes.

Example output

What "Copy for Obsidian" produces

A representative sample of the exact markdown Sumvid copies to your clipboard — frontmatter, then the summary body with a deep-linked timestamp.

---
title: "Why Async Rust Is Still Hard"
channel: "Conference Talks"
source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
date: 2026-07-10
language: en
tags: [youtube, video-summary]
---

## Why Async Rust Is Still Hard
A conference talk on the ergonomic pain points that remain in Rust's async ecosystem, with practical workarounds for each.

**Key takeaways**
- Pinning and `Send` bounds are still the top source of confusing compiler errors for async beginners.
- The speaker recommends `tokio-console` for diagnosing stalled tasks in production.

At [12:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ&t=724s), the speaker walks through a live debugging example.

When not to bother

Skip this workflow for very short videos — a two-minute clip is often faster to just watch than to summarize and file. It's also not worth it for a video you were going to watch in full anyway, like a show or a video from a channel you follow purely for entertainment; a note built for quick reference isn't the point when watching is the point.

Try it on a video you actually want in your vault.

FAQ

Common questions

How do I get a YouTube video into Obsidian?
Summarize the video on Sumvid, open the share menu on the finished summary, and click "Copy for Obsidian." Paste the result straight into a note in your vault — it arrives with YAML frontmatter and a summary body already formatted.
Does the Obsidian export include timestamps?
Yes. Any [m:ss] timestamp in the summary is exported as a markdown link that jumps straight to that second in the YouTube video, so a note built from Sumvid stays clickable outside the app.
Is there a Sumvid plugin for Obsidian?
No — Sumvid doesn't ship an Obsidian plugin. "Copy for Obsidian" produces plain markdown with YAML frontmatter that you paste into a note yourself; no plugin install or vault integration is required.
What frontmatter fields does the export include?
title, an optional channel (omitted when unknown), source (the video's YouTube URL), date, language, and tags: [youtube, video-summary] — enough for Obsidian's properties pane and for tag-based searches across your vault.