Import a YouTube video

YouTube videos work the same way as PDFs in Ritsu — paste the URL, we fetch the transcript and audio, and the result is a source with auto-extracted Points of Knowledge.

Steps

1. Open Sources from the left sidebar.
2. Click Paste link.
3. Paste a YouTube URL (works with youtube.com/watch?v=…, youtu.be/…, and youtube.com/shorts/…).
4. Click Import. Ritsu fetches the transcript and processes.
5. When done, the video appears in your library. Click any PoK to open the Learning Chat.

What Ritsu fetches

• Auto-generated transcript if available (YouTube provides one for most videos)
• Manually-added captions if the creator uploaded them — these are higher quality
• Audio + Whisper transcription as a fallback when the video has no transcript at all (adds ~30 seconds for a 30-minute video)

The transcript is what becomes the source text. Section detection runs on it: long lectures get split into PoKs by topic shift; short videos become one PoK.

Languages

Auto-detected from the transcript. Ritsu supports English, Vietnamese, and 30+ other languages with native transcripts. For videos in other languages, transcription falls back to Whisper, which handles 90+ languages.

If the video has captions in multiple languages, Ritsu picks the auto-detected one by default — override from the source's settings page after import.

Limits

Item	Free	Pro
Video length	60 min	8 hours
Imports per day	5	Unlimited
Total storage	1 GB	50 GB

A 60-minute lecture transcript is typically 200-500 KB of text — well within all limits.

What works well

• Lectures (single speaker, structured) — almost always great PoK extraction
• Tutorials (code-along, walkthrough) — works well, especially with chapters in the description
• Conference talks — works well, transcript quality matters most

What works less well

• Videos with heavy on-screen visuals and no narration — the transcript misses the visual content
• Music videos / no-speech content — transcription returns nothing useful
• Live streams (3+ hours) — exceed Pro's 8-hour limit and the transcript quality of YouTube auto-captions degrades on long content

Tips

• Use playlist URLs to import a series. Paste a playlist URL and Ritsu offers to import the whole list — useful for a multi-part lecture series.
• Reprocess if a creator updates captions. See Reprocess a source.
• Time-stamped citations. When Ritsu cites the video in /explain or /quiz answers, it includes timestamp links — click to jump to that exact moment.

Trouble

• "Video unavailable" — usually means the video is age-restricted, region-locked, or set to "private". Public + unrestricted only.
• Transcript missing — for videos with no captions and no clear audio, Ritsu can't reliably extract content. Try a different upload of the same talk.