LearningLib turns any playlist or channel into a structured, trackable course — progress, timestamped notes, searchable transcripts, and roadmaps. Self-hosted, so none of it leaves your server.
47 tabs open, three "learn X in 2024" videos half-watched, no order, no prerequisites, no idea what's actually left.
Close the tab, lose the timestamp. There's no record of what you've actually finished across a whole channel or topic.
Screenshots, a notes app, a sticky note on the monitor — whatever you scribbled down at 14:02 is gone by the next video.
Any public YouTube playlist, channel, or single video URL — no manual data entry, no re-uploading anything.
Titles, durations, thumbnails and order get pulled in and organized into lessons — ready to work through in sequence.
Watch progress, notes at exact timestamps, bookmarks, and a searchable transcript — attached to the lesson, permanently.
Turn any playlist or channel into a structured course in one paste, with lessons already in the right order.
Every lesson tracks watch position and completion automatically — pick up exactly where you left off.
Drop a note at the exact second it mattered, not "somewhere in part 3." Bookmarks work the same way.
Find the moment something was actually said, across every lesson in a course — not just the title.
Chain courses into a real learning path with visible prerequisites, instead of a folder of unrelated links.
Runs on your own server behind your own domain. Your notes, progress, and history never leave it.
No third-party auth, no analytics SDKs phoning home, no vendor lock-in. It's a Dockerized service you run yourself, with a typed API underneath every screen.
YouTube quietly became the largest, most current technical curriculum on Earth — updated faster than any bootcamp, and covering things no university course catalog will touch for years. What it never got was the layer every real course needs: structure, a record of progress, and somewhere notes actually live. That's the gap.
Millions of hours of free, constantly-updated technical instruction — no content business to run, just the layer on top.
Bookmark folders, spreadsheets, sticky notes — the demand for structure is visible in the workarounds people already use.
Self-hosting your own tools has gone from hobbyist habit to a real selling point — this is built for that audience from day one.
Engineers picking up a new stack, a new language, or a whole new field — one YouTube course at a time, with nothing to show for the ones they finished.
Managers who already point new engineers at "watch these five playlists first" — with no way to see who actually did, or how far they got.
Instructors leaning on free YouTube material for a syllabus, who need something more accountable than "trust me, I watched it."
"I kept losing my place in genuinely great YouTube courses — no record of what I'd finished, notes scattered across three different apps. LearningLib is the tool I wanted to exist, built the way I'd build any piece of infrastructure I depend on."
LearningLib is live and self-hostable today — built solo by an engineer who spends most of his time in systems and infra, not a landing page with a waitlist behind it.