Distill vs Scribiz

Distill turns captioned YouTube videos into written summaries, with interviews, podcasts, and educational long-form video as its focus. Summaries are flowing prose divided into sections, and users can switch among summary, chapter, and transcript views. A player above the summary lets viewers jump to a chapter or moment, and each summary is followed by a short quiz. Distill relies on captions and reports when a video has no subtitles rather than inferring content from its title or description. It supports public captioned YouTube videos, focuses on videos roughly four minutes and longer, and does not support Shorts or very short clips. Users can paste a YouTube link or open one shared from YouTube or Safari. Guest access allows one summary a day for videos up to 30 minutes. An email-verified free account allows three daily summaries for videos up to 60 minutes, plus a saved library, sync, continued watching, and offline reading. Pro is $3.99 a month and includes unlimited summaries, videos up to two hours, 40+ languages, chapters, transcripts, and an outline. Distill is available on iOS.

Scribiz turns a video link or file into a transcript, on-screen text, summary, and chapters. It uses available captions when suitable and listens to audio when captions are missing or poor. Watch mode reads visible material such as slides and code, adding timestamps to notes. Results can be exported in SRT, VTT, TXT, Markdown, or JSON. YouTube, direct media links, podcast feeds, and uploads work best; TikTok, X, and Vimeo are best effort on the web, while Instagram links usually require uploading a file. The web tool accepts files up to 100 MB and about 50 minutes of audio. Scribiz says local video processing sends audio chunks, and may send a small low-resolution copy for Watch, rather than uploading an entire video. Media is deleted when a job ends, while results expire after 24 hours or after 30 days with an account. Its HTTP API creates asynchronous jobs from links or uploads and exposes status, results, and progress events; webhooks are unavailable, so users can poll or follow the event stream. A remote MCP server supports Claude, Cursor, and Codex. The free plan includes daily and monthly usage limits. Pro costs $10 a month; Mac Lifetime costs $99, paid once and is not on sale yet.