# media-extended: video notes inside Obsidian, and a licence change > Media Extended turns an Obsidian vault into a video notebook, with timestamped links, transcript search and screenshot capture tied back to the source. It is also a project that has moved its version 4 line to closed source, with the earlier code left open under the MIT licence on a separate branch. That change is the first thing in the readme and the first thing to weigh. **aidenlx/media-extended** — Transform your Obsidian into a powerful video note-taking tool. 🖇️🗂️⏯️ - Repository: https://github.com/aidenlx/media-extended - Website: https://mx.aidenlx.site - Stars: 960 · Forks: 84 - Language: Unknown - License: not declared - Published: 2026-10-20 · Updated: 2026-10-20 · Language: en - Canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/aidenlx-media-extended ## What the plugin actually does The description is short: a media integration plugin for Obsidian that transforms your Obsidian into a video note-taking tool. The overview expands it a little. It is a plugin that integrates media playback and management into Obsidian, and the framing is aimed at a student, a researcher or a content creator. The claim is that it makes it easier to incorporate, control and reference audio and video materials directly inside a digital notebook, while preserving the philosophy of plain-text, future-proof note-taking that Obsidian is built on. That last clause is the design constraint that shapes everything else. The plugin does not put the video in the note, it puts a link in the note. A note contains a link with a fragment that says where in the video to start, and the plugin resolves that link into a player when you open it. The note stays readable, greppable and portable, and the media stays where it was. That is the difference from a plugin that copies media into a vault, and it is why the timestamp features matter more than the player features. A video is long, and the value of a notebook is in pointing at the ten seconds that matter. The project has its own website, with documentation for the fourth version, and a community page. The GitHub repository holds the plugin manifest and a changelog, and the code itself is not in the public tree for the current version. ## The licence change, which the readme puts first Before the overview, before the features, there is a warning, and it is the most consequential thing in the document. Future releases of the fourth version will be closed source. The original codebase up to version 3 remains open source under the MIT licence and can be found on a separate branch in the repository, and the readme links to the fourth version release notes for the details of the change. So the project has split in two. What people could read and modify before is still readable and modifiable, on the version 3 branch, under a permissive licence. What comes next is not. That is a legitimate choice, and plenty of projects have made it, usually after the community has shown that the effort of maintaining it outweighed the benefit. What it means for an evaluator is that the interesting questions change. If you wanted to read the code to understand how the plugin resolves a timestamp link, or to fix a bug yourself, that path is now closed for the current version. If you wanted to use the plugin, nothing changes except that the releases you cannot inspect are the ones you will be running. The readme's framing is notable in that it is stated as a notice rather than buried, and the earlier code is not deleted but left on a branch. That is the fairest way to make the change, and it means the history of the project remains inspectable. ## The feature table, and the part that is genuinely unusual The feature list is a table, and one row is different from the others. Broad media support opens and plays local media files, remote URLs, and videos from services like YouTube and Vimeo directly in Obsidian. Advanced playback control works with global hotkeys without leaving your notes, and the player can be pinned to avoid tab clutter. Customisable templates let you tailor the format of inserted timestamps and screenshot links to your own workflow. And powerful linking creates media links and embeds with fragments for start and end times, looping and auto-play. Timestamps are the core of it. The plugin inserts links to specific moments in the media with a single click or command, and clicking a timestamp jumps to the exact moment. Screenshot capture takes a frame from a video, offers cropping options, and embeds the result in your note with a timestamp link back to the source. The row that stands out is interactive transcripts. You link a transcript file, with the subtitle formats, to your media, and then you can click to navigate, search the full text, and copy timestamped quotes. For a researcher or a student, that is the feature that turns a video into a document you can work with, because it makes the spoken content searchable and quotable without leaving the notebook. And live recording timestamps handles the case where you did not plan ahead. While you use Obsidian's own audio recorder, you drop timestamp markers into your notes, and they automatically become clickable links when the recording is saved. The plugin is working with the recorder you already have rather than replacing it. ## The disclosures, and why they are in the readme There are two important notices about access, and the fact that they are in the readme rather than in a separate document is the right call. The first is about the file system. The plugin may access files outside of Obsidian vaults when you store media files on external drives, portable disks, or cloud storage services such as OneDrive, and the readme says this access is necessary to play media files that are not stored directly within the vault. The second is about the network. The plugin requires network access to stream media from online services, and to connect to hosted WebDAV services for remote media storage. The reassurance is that connections are only made to services you explicitly configure or link to. Both notices are reasonable, and both are the kind of thing a vault user should read before granting permissions to a plugin. A note-taking tool is where a lot of private writing lives, and a plugin that can read files outside the vault is asking for a permission that looks alarming unless you know why it needs it. The readme is also careful about the Obsidian URI scheme, which lets you open a media item in the plugin from a link anywhere on the web. The quick start gives a working example, and the URL is a plain scheme with an encoded target. ```txt obsidian://mx-open?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DUF8uR6Z6KLc ``` The example is a famous 2005 commencement address, and the point of it is that you can paste the link into a browser's address bar and the video opens inside Obsidian. ## A repository that is mostly a distribution shell The top level of the repository is worth a look, because it explains the shape of the project. ```json "private": true, ``` The package manifest is a private package that exports a handful of files, the plugin manifest, a beta version of it, the versions file and the package file itself. ```json "./manifest.json": "./manifest.json", ``` There is also the plugin manifest and the versions file at the root, a changelog, a directory of assets with the images used in the readme, a configuration file for the comment widget, and two directories whose names are more revealing than they look. One is a web clipper, which is the companion tool for capturing material from a browser into the vault. The other is named after a video identifier, and it suggests a fixture or a sample capture tied to a specific piece of media. So the public repository for version 4 is a distribution shell. It holds the metadata the Obsidian plugin system needs, the assets, the changelog and the supporting tools, and the plugin logic itself is elsewhere. The versions file is the interesting part of that. The Obsidian plugin format requires the plugin to declare which versions of the application it supports, and shipping that file in the repository is how the community sees the compatibility range at a glance without installing anything. For a user deciding whether a plugin will still work after an Obsidian update, that file matters more than the readme. ## Support channels and the pace of releases Support is routed to two places, and the split is sensible. Questions and issues go to the community page on the project website, and bug reports go to the question and answer category of the repository discussions. The distinction is the usual one between a user who needs help and a user who has found a defect, and separating them keeps the bug tracker readable. The release history shows a project that ships often. Version 4.2.7 came out in June 2026, 4.2.8 on 7 October, and 4.2.9 the following day, with the last push on 2026-10-08. The primary language is not listed, which fits a plugin written in a language the repository does not publish, and the licence is likewise unstated in the listing for the same reason the readme had to explain the change in terms. That double release in a day is worth noting for what it implies. A plugin that ships a patch and then a follow-up the next day is a plugin that is being maintained actively, and with a closed source model that maintenance is not visible in the repository, so the release notes on the project site are the changelog you actually read. The overall picture is of a well-built plugin with one genuine tension in it. The features are good, particularly the transcript and timestamp work, and the disclosure of the access the plugin needs is better than most plugins manage. The licence change, though, means that the codebase you can read is not the codebase you run, and for a plugin that holds a vault's private notes, that is the trade a careful user has to think about rather than accept. ## Conclusion media-extended suits a student or researcher who watches long recordings and wants the moments that matter linked from plain text notes, because the timestamp and transcript features do work that a general purpose tool cannot. It is a poor fit if you need to keep extending it yourself, since the version 4 code is closing, and a poor fit if you are not willing to grant the plugin file system and network access. Before you install it, read the disclosures and decide about the access the plugin asks for, and if the licence matters to you, look at the version 3 branch, which stays open. ## FAQ ### What does the media-extended Obsidian plugin do? It integrates media playback and management into Obsidian. You can open local files, remote URLs and videos from services like YouTube and Vimeo, control playback with global hotkeys, insert timestamped links that jump to an exact moment, capture cropped screenshots with a link back to the source, link subtitle transcripts for searching and quoting, and drop timestamps into notes while recording audio. ### Is media-extended still open source? Only the earlier code. The readme states that future releases of version 4 will be closed source, while the original codebase up to version 3 remains open source under the MIT licence on the version 3 branch of the repository. ### What permissions does the media-extended plugin need? The readme discloses two things. The plugin may access files outside of your vault when media is stored on external drives, portable disks or cloud storage, which is needed to play media not stored in the vault. It also needs network access to stream from online services and to connect to hosted WebDAV storage, and connections are only made to services you configure or link to. ### Can I use timestamps with a recording I make in Obsidian? Yes. While using the Obsidian audio recorder you can drop timestamp markers into your notes, and they automatically become clickable links when the recording is saved, so the live note-taking path works without planning the links in advance. ## Sources - [aidenlx/media-extended on GitHub](https://github.com/aidenlx/media-extended) - [Issues](https://github.com/aidenlx/media-extended/issues) - [Project website](https://mx.aidenlx.site) - [README](https://github.com/aidenlx/media-extended/blob/main/README.md) - [Releases](https://github.com/aidenlx/media-extended/releases) --- Hysen Labs editorial analysis, written from the project's own repository and release notes. Cite the canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/aidenlx-media-extended