Introducing FENFinder! A free tool to find specific chess positions that appear in YouTube videos.

I built FENfinder (fenfinder.com) mainly to serve my desire to quickly find YouTube videos featuring specific positions uploaded by creators that I know produce high-quality content. I'm crawling across a curated set of playlists (see: fenfinder.com/ytprocessor/playlists.csv) and am always interested to hear additional content suggestions.

Indexing the positions is a little time and CPU intensive so I'm limiting it to the first 30 unique positions (not counting the starting position) that I find in the video. I intend to double-back over the playlists in the future to re-index the full videos which may feature additional games, opening theory analysis, etc. That said, there are already over 3K videos in the index featuring over 67K unique positions.

I'm aware that there are more polished for-pay versions of this already that have some pretty cool additional features implemented (some of which I may explore adding). However, I'd be curious to hear from the community what features you think would be useful to prioritize that would complement this, or what changes you would make.

Thanks for taking a look!

Wow, that's brilliant! I'd actually been thinking how great it would be if something like this existed, and now it does!

The only real feature that I'd add would be a tick-box list as a channel selector so you can pick more than one content creator that you're interested in.

Some other playlists that I'd love to see, if your CPU time allowed for it, would include:
Chess Dojo US Chess School and maybe "Openings", although the latter is more of a mixed bag
Andras Toth - Understanding Your Openings and Know Thy Classics
STL - I mean there's loads, I tend to watch Dorsa Derakshani and Caleb Denby

Thanks for sharing, anyway!

@malbin
Great nice app, I want to take a guess about how it works
You are using a database but how was it made, you could use basic image processing or even object detection algorithms to run on frames of a bunch of videos and use them, it would give you a bigger number of positions to work with I think

isnt it a video finder more than a FEN finder?

Dan Heisman and Yasser Seirawan werent named yet.
edit: Ivanchuk also has a YT channel where he goes over lots of classic games.

Yasser doesnt seem to have his own channel. Did some stuff with chessbrahs and here are 109 lectures for STL:
/watch?v=cnqsCIFJT1Q&list=PLVWaFpMwtaGiVZ77NhhvGGGzvF7oFSWcA

Dan Heisman:
/@danheismanchess

Ivanchuk:
/@IvanchukChess

@Rookitiki said in #4:
> isnt it a video finder more than a FEN finder?
>
> Dan Heisman and Yasser Seirawan werent named yet.

I suppose it’s both! It finds FENs within videos :)

Do Yasser and Dan Heisman have YouTube channels? I’d certainly add them!

EDIT: Whoops i see now you literally included their usernames in your message! I’ll check them out for sure.

very good idea to not be forced to ingest so much stream before having some entendement at the board level.

or for autonomous driven chess exploration. getting chunks out of long streams with some plan of study.. (be it a chaotic one, it would be own).

@RamblinDave said in #2:
> Wow, that's brilliant! I'd actually been thinking how great it would be if something like this existed, and now it does!
>
> The only real feature that I'd add would be a tick-box list as a channel selector so you can pick more than one content creator that you're interested in.
>
> Some other playlists that I'd love to see, if your CPU time allowed for it, would include:
> Chess Dojo US Chess School and maybe "Openings", although the latter is more of a mixed bag
> Andras Toth - Understanding Your Openings and Know Thy Classics
> STL - I mean there's loads, I tend to watch Dorsa Derakshani and Caleb Denby
>
> Thanks for sharing, anyway!

Thanks for the idea—it makes a lot of sense and I can definitely work on that. I can see how that would be useful especially as the list of uploaders continues to grow.

Thanks for both of those recommendations. I will certainly add them!

@BinaryBishop said in #3:
> @malbin
> Great nice app, I want to take a guess about how it works
> You are using a database but how was it made, you could use basic image processing or even object detection algorithms to run on frames of a bunch of videos and use them, it would give you a bigger number of positions to work with I think

Yeah you pretty much hit the nail on the head. I wrote a large-ish multithreaded script to churn through that CSV that I linked in my original post. For each playlist:
— I create an array of all the videos and for each video...
— Download a local copy (yt-dlp)
— Split it into 1 second images (ffmpeg)
— Try to find a chess position in the image (chessfenbot)
— Save the positions and time stamps in a database.

As you can see, most of the heavy lifting was done by people who wrote the software that I rely on :)

Then I built a simple API to access the database and some hacked together javascript to interact with it all and to present the results.

I did most of this in close consultation with ChatGPT, which has been a pretty eye opening experience in itself. I’ve never built a web app before — I’m mostly a server / backend person — and I used AI largely as a sounding board for everything, and as a mechanism to unblock me whenever I got stuck. It worked incredibly well!