Import a YouTube video

YouTube videos work the same way as PDFs in Ritsu — paste the URL, we fetch the video's captions, 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

• Manually-added captions if the creator uploaded them — these are the highest quality
• Auto-generated captions otherwise (YouTube provides them for most videos)

A video with no captions at all can't be imported — Ritsu doesn't transcribe the audio itself.

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

Ritsu asks for captions in the language you study in, and falls back to the video's other caption tracks when that language isn't available.

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	Plus	Pro	Ultra
Video length	30 min	2 hours	6 hours	12 hours

A one-hour lecture fits Plus and above; on Free, pick videos up to 30 minutes. There's no daily import limit. The current limits for each plan are always on the pricing page.

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
• Very long streams — anything past your plan's video length (2 hours on Plus, 6 on Pro, 12 on Ultra) can't be imported, and auto-captions get less reliable 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 — the video has no captions, so there's nothing for Ritsu to read. Try a different upload of the same talk that has captions.