YouTube Summarizer: Turn Any Video into a Summary & Mind Map

What the YouTube summarizer gives you

Most YouTube summarizers hand you a paragraph. That's fine for a 6-minute clip, but a 90-minute lecture squeezed into a paragraph loses almost everything worth keeping. MindLM writes the summary as a mind map instead. The video's main topics become the first-level branches, the arguments and examples under each topic become child nodes, and you can collapse anything you don't need right now.

The result is a summary you can read at two speeds. Skim the top level in ten seconds to see what the video covers, then open the one branch you care about and read the detail the speaker actually gave. Nothing is locked: rename nodes, drag branches, delete the sponsor segment, or add your own notes next to the speaker's points.

How the summary is built

MindLM works from the video's captions, not the pixels. When you paste a link, it looks up the title and duration, then shows the credit cost for the Fast and Pro models before anything runs. After you confirm and pick an output language, the AI reads the full transcript and groups what was said into topics, sub-points, and examples.

Because the input is the transcript, the summary is only as good as the speech in the video. Lectures, interviews, tutorials, product keynotes, and explainers work well. Music videos, gameplay without commentary, and silent footage have nothing to summarize.

Supported languages

MindLM reads manual and auto-generated captions in whatever language the video provides. For the output you have two options:

• Auto — the mind map follows the language of the video.
• Pick one of 9 languages — English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, or Russian.

That second option doubles as a translator. Summarizing a Japanese conference talk into an English mind map is a single step.

How long a video can be

There is no fixed duration cap. What limits a run is the length of the transcript, measured in characters:

Plan	Transcript limit	Roughly equals
Pro	300,000 characters	about 20 hours of speech
Max	600,000 characters	about 40 hours of speech

MindLM budgets about 250 characters of transcript per minute of video, so a 3-hour lecture uses around 45,000 characters, well inside either plan. If a transcript runs past your plan's limit, the extra is trimmed rather than rejected. YouTube input is part of the Pro and Max plans. The Free plan covers text, PDFs, webpages, images, and eBooks.

Export formats

When the map looks right, take it wherever you work:

• PNG — drop it into slides, a Notion page, or your lecture notes.
• SVG — a vector file that stays sharp at any size, good for printing a study sheet.
• Markdown — a nested outline that pastes cleanly into Obsidian, Notion, Logseq, or any Markdown editor.
• Share link — a public, read-only page for classmates or teammates who don't have an account.

There is no direct PDF export yet. If you need a PDF, print the PNG or SVG.

When a video isn't the best source

If the same material exists as a document, such as lecture slides, a paper, or a report, the document usually produces a cleaner map, because headings give the AI structure that speech doesn't have. In that case, summarize a PDF into a mind map instead, or run both and compare what the speaker emphasized against what the slides say.

How MindLM compares with other summarizers

Several tools now turn YouTube videos into mind maps, and they differ in input types, editing, export options, and price. For a side-by-side look at the main options, read our comparison of Mapify alternatives.