Convert your videos to mp3 audio files

[00:00:00] Introduction and Sample Video Explanation

Alright, so now I will actually explain how you can do all the things that I mentioned in the previous lesson. The first thing that I want to mention is that I have the sample video at the top of this page. I will provide a link to this page under this lesson. This sample video is what I am going to use as an example. You can see that it has some chapters and all that, and later on, you will see that I will also provide a transcript for this video.

Now, I selected this one because it discusses some technical concepts, but also because it has some incorrectly transcribed words. This helps me explain some of the limitations of using this approach. I just want to point that out because, even though my view is that the transcription accuracy nowadays has become really good, you have to remember that it is not 100 percent. Then, you will find that there are some small mistakes here and there, and you should be able to tolerate that if you want to proceed with this approach.

[00:01:08] Converting MP4 Files to MP3 Format

So, the first thing you have to do is convert your MP4 files into MP3 format. One of the most popular formats for videos for online courses is usually the MP4 format. What you can do is take a bunch of MP4 files in a folder and then bulk convert them into MP3 all at once. There are some tools which you can use to do this.

For the Mac, you have this free MP4 converter that I am showing here. It is free, and you also have other tools, similar tools for Windows. What I usually notice is that these tools are, you may have to pay for some advanced features, but for doing something as basic as bulk conversion from MP4 to MP3, you do not really, I think that there are free tools available for all the platforms. But if you still do not want to do that, you can still write a Python script to do this conversion, and it is not very complicated. I will also explain how to do that in a future lesson.