I have not been able to import any youtube videos for many weeks. It’s completely broken as far as I can see. It would be good if we could be updated on when it’s down and when to expect a resolution.
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For me it’s still not working. It’s the third consecutive day that it’s happening.
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This… I have several of these and they say they have already been deleted but the annoying red boxes are still there.
And I’m having trouble importing, same as everyone else here.
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I just pasted in the “Original URL” for videos and it works fine.
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What do you mean? Did you use the LingQ importer extension or did you do it manually?
Do your videos have subtitles or are you depending on the autogeneration?
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No. Nothing is working. Nothing is going to work. If there was any changes to be made they’d’ve happened already. The app seems broken for good.
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I go to “import” and then paste in the address into “original URL” and my youtube videos upload. I paste the transcript in the text box manually, whenever the Youtube video provides the transcript in the text below the video. The videos also have subtitles.
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Gotcha. I think I remember seeing somewhere else that the upload can work if there’s a transcript provided.
I don’t have transcripts so it won’t work for the videos I watch.
Thanks for the quick response.
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Which application are you using when you “go to import” ?
Ah, okay after a long time searching I found an import button in the iOS application, in the bottom right of the screen. Sometimes the text Import disappears which makes it hard to find. I expected it to be with other button e.g. in the bottom row. Is that what you mean? I tried that, and the import fails, no internet connection apparently, which is nonsense as I have an excellent internet connection.
As someone else already posted it is possible to import YouTube videos that don’t come with a transcript, too. The workflow is as follows:
- Use a tool that allow you to download Youtube videos, preferable one that automatically convert the videos to mp3 audio files. I use YouTube Playlist Downloader, but there are a bunch of other freeware tools for that purpose.
- Use the mp3 file to create the lesson. The lesson will get transcribed and the timestamps created. On my end this took a few minutes (<5 for a 12 min video)
- Edit the lesson → under video add the YouTube link.
- If you want the timestamps to work with the video, delete the audio file (there is a red trash can symbol next to the audio file gui).
It isn’t optimal but the extra effort is, depending on how fast you can click, less then a minute.
Timestamps not working if both audio and video are present is a known issue.
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Thanks this method is working for youtube videos after converting to MP4/3
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Just wanted to provide a personal update here, that I still can’t import anything from YouTube using the extension on my laptop or on my phone at all.
However, I was able to manually import a YouTube video (yesterday) by manually adding the link, copying and pasting the transcript from YouTube.
Hope this helps some folks until this bug can be addressed.
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I use an iPad and I was unable to find a suitable tool in the Apple app Store. If anyone knows of one, please let me know.
I like Apple products, but the ecosystem is very closed, by which I mean that so many useful tools are not available on iOS.
Could it be that all the YouTube problems have nothing to do with LingQ, but with the browsers used? I don’t have a special browser installed on my laptop, I just use Microsoft Edge. And I don’t have any problems importing YouTube videos.
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That would make sense if the issue would have occoured after a browser update. I don’t think that this was the case for me, although I am unsure. But there are many different browsers used by the people here as well as different operating systems. I would be surprised if all of them included a change in their code causing this issue with Microsoft Edge beeing the only product still working. Isn’t it usually the other way round? 
But you might be on to something if other users who utilize Edge, in which case we should tell @zoran about it.
It’s workng on my iphone app again 
I sucessfuly imported 4 or 5 videos today
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You’re right, I imported a German video today, all was good. Using iPad.
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We hope to have YT issues fixed for good soon, our team is constantly working on it.
It is a problem with changes that YouTube has made and we are working to resolve it. In the meantime, YT import should still work with videos that have manual captions.
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@zoran Is it intented behaviour, that when importing a video with subtitles in the videos language, that those parts of the text which are enclosed in < > brackets get excluded? I have imported videos where does signs are used as " " when saying the name of the channel, and they are all missing in the text.
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Yes, I think that’s how it always worked but I’ll check with team to confirm.
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