NotebookLM (now also called Gemini Notebook) is great at one thing people underuse: you can add a YouTube video as a source and then ask questions across everything you've added. The catch is it takes one URL at a time — fine for a couple of videos, rough for a whole course.
Here's the free manual way, and the shortcut at the end.
The manual method
- Open the playlist on YouTube.
- For each video, copy its link.
- In NotebookLM: Add source -> paste the URL.
- Repeat for every video.
That's genuinely all there is to it — no integration, no export. It just doesn't scale past a handful because it's the same four clicks over and over.
One thing worth knowing
NotebookLM works off the video's transcript, not the visuals. So playlists where people talk — lectures, conference talks, tutorials — give it a lot to work with. Silent footage or pure music won't.
Why bother at all
Once a playlist is in, you can ask across the whole thing: "what are the main arguments in this course," "which video covers deployment," and each answer tells you which video it came from. That per-source attribution is the part that makes it trustworthy instead of a summary you take on faith.
The shortcut
The only painful step is adding 30 URLs by hand. That's the exact step I automated in my extension, NotebookBloom (https://notebookbloom.com) — paste a single playlist or channel link and it adds them all as sources. But the manual method above is free and works today; the extension just removes the tedium.
Get it on the Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/fmnhogknjhlaicceielblddajjabjlha
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