There’s a pretty interesting thread on Hacker News where people have shared links to their favorite technical talks. The thread includes dozens of links pointing to YouTube, Vimeo and other video websites.

It’s a treasure trove and I want to click on every single video that’s mentioned on that page but the problem is that I will then end up having at least two dozen new tabs in the browser. And this isn’t just about Hacker News, you can open any popular thread on sites like Quora or Reddit and you’ll be overwhelmed with links pointing to interesting stuff.

How do you deal with such a large collection of raw links? I have written an app called Video Slides that some may find handy here. The app will scan the text for video URLs and put them all in a single slideshow without cluttering your browser.

Here’s a quick video demo.

Demo Presentation Create Video Slides

The idea is a simple one.

You copy the text of the entire thread and paste it into Video Slides. The app will then extract all the Youtube and Vimeo URLs from your text and will create a slideshow putting one video per slide. You can use the arrow keys to navigate through the slides.

You may paste text from comment threads, HTML source of a web page or even email messages and there’s no need to use any special formats. You can even use the short youtu.be URLs. The app currently extracts Vimeo and YouTube URLs only but going forward, we should be able to use any web service that supports oEmbed.

Internally, Video Slides uses the Embed.ly API to extract the embed code for the video URLs while the presentations are generated through the awesome reveal.js library. Give it a try and your feedback will help shape up the next version. ↓