YouTube imports

What YouTube-based imports do, what they preserve, and common pitfalls.

What gets imported

When you import a YouTube video URL, Valo Reader pulls available timed text (captions or subtitles) and prepares a story scaffold for reading and listening workflows. The resulting story includes the caption text segmented by time, linked to the corresponding audio from the video.

This means you can read along with the video audio, tap words for definitions, and navigate by sentence or caption cue just like any other story.

What you need

A successful YouTube import depends on the video having accessible captions:

  • Manual captions uploaded by the video creator work best. They tend to be accurate and well-timed.
  • Auto-generated captions may work but have lower accuracy, especially for music, heavy accents, or low-audio-quality recordings.

Not every video exposes captions in a usable form. If captions are missing, disabled, or restricted to a language the system cannot handle, the import may fail or produce a story with no text content.

The import process

From the import dialog, paste the YouTube URL. The system attempts to fetch the video metadata and captions. If successful, a new story is created with the caption text, a reference to the video audio, and processing begins.

During processing, the caption text is tokenized and study structures are built, just like any other import. When the story reaches READY status, you can open the reader and start studying with the audio aligned to the text.

When the import fails or produces low-quality results

If the story has no text or very fragmentary text:

  • Verify the video has usable captions on YouTube itself
  • Try a different video with manually created captions
  • Consider downloading the captions separately (if available) and importing them as a subtitle file alongside the audio

If the audio does not play or the timing is wrong, the cue alignment between captions and audio may need adjustment. See Audio playback and subtitle cues for troubleshooting steps.