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How to Summarize Videos That Aren’t on YouTube

The Rundown: When videos are hosted on YouTube, summarizing them is simple - most AI tools can detect the transcript directly. But if your content lives on Vimeo, Google Drive, or other platforms without a visible transcript, you’ll need a different approach. Here’s how to tackle it.

🧰 Who is this useful for:

  • Content creators working with private or non-YouTube video files
  • Market researchers analyzing recorded interviews
  • Educators summarizing lectures or presentations
  • Business professionals capturing meeting insights


STEP 1: Start with Your Video Source

Choose the video you need summarized. In this example, we’ll use a 30-minute interview about the stock market (150 MB MP4 file). The larger the file, the trickier it may be for some AI tools to handle.


STEP 2: Try Comet Browser with Perplexity

Open Comet Browser and launch the assistant from the top right. With this assistant, you can ask it any question with a simple chat interface.
You can ask Comet to: “Analyze the following video interview and summarize it in great detail.”

Limitation: If the video is stored in Google Drive with restricted access, Perplexity won’t be able to process it unless it’s publicly shareable or uploaded to YouTube.

Alternate fix: Provide a transcript or timestamps for targeted analysis.

Screenshot 2025-08-12 at 4.59.48 PM.png


STEP 3: Use Google AI Studio for Larger Context Processing

  • Upload your video file directly to Google AI Studio.
  • Advantage: It supports very large context windows. (over 1 million tokens) - You can technically upload full-sized books.
  • Settings: Adjust model type (Flashlight for fast/cheap, Pro for detailed analysis) and temperature for creativity vs. precision.
  • Limitation: Files over ~300 MB may fail.
  • Tip: Prompt it with specific instructions, e.g., “Analyze this interview and extract key ideas I should understand.”
Screenshot 2025-08-12 at 5.01.16 PM.png


STEP 4: Explore Paid Upload & Summarization Tools

  1. Grain.com – Meeting notes tool.
    • Paid upgrade allows MP4 uploads.
    • Extracts transcript, creates summaries, generates action items, and integrates with Slack or CRM.
Screenshot 2025-08-12 at 5.02.09 PM.png
  1. Loom – Video recording tool.
    • Paid version allows MP4 uploads.
    • Summarizes video and provides an editable transcript.
Screenshot 2025-08-12 at 5.02.42 PM.png


STEP 5: Use the YouTube Workaround

Even for private videos, you can upload them unlisted to YouTube, then feed the link to an AI summarizer. This leverages YouTube’s built-in transcript detection and avoids file size limits.


Pro Tip:
Most videos you’ll want to summarize are already on YouTube - use YouTube Transcript sites, Copilot, or Comet to quickly extract text. For rare cases where the video is private or off-YouTube, Google AI Studio or paid upload tools are your best bet.