Boards and Beyond to Anki: Auto-Generate Flashcards From Every Lecture (Free Tool)
AnKing and Lightyear cover the canonical Step 1 content beautifully. Pathoma and Sketchy are elite. But the actual Boards and Beyond lecture you watched last Tuesday — the specific way Dr. Ryan framed ejection fraction, the pharm mnemonic that only clicked because of his three-line aside — that’s not in any shared deck. It lives in your head for about an hour, then evaporates.
This guide walks through a free workflow that captures those one-off moments as Anki cards automatically.
The problem with watching BnB without a capture system
Medical school video study has a built-in leak. You watch a 25-minute Boards and Beyond lecture. You nod at three or four specific micro-facts. Nothing about the act of watching forces those facts into a review queue. Two weeks later on your first Anki run you remember “oh right, there was something about Frank-Starling curves in that BnB video” and you have to scrub through the whole lecture to find it.
AnKing solves this for the canon. But AnKing is a shared deck — it cannot know which exact Dr. Ryan phrasing you found useful. That gap is where most “I watched it but didn’t retain it” losses happen.
The workflow
1. Watch BnB inside NoteTube AI instead of the native YouTube app
Open NoteTube, paste the BnB YouTube link. The video loads inside the app with the usual player controls plus four extra tabs: Notes, Transcript, Summary, Flashcards.
2. Tap the Flashcards tab, tap Generate
About 20 seconds later you have 10 exam-style Q&A cards. Each card is anchored to the specific timestamp in the lecture where the answer is grounded. An example card from a Cardiovascular Pharm lecture looks like:
Front: Which class of antihypertensives is contraindicated in bilateral renal artery stenosis?
Back: ACE inhibitors (and ARBs). Both block angiotensin II–mediated efferent arteriole constriction, which is the only thing maintaining glomerular filtration pressure when renal perfusion is already low from stenosis.
Source: 6:42 — Dr. Ryan “Why ACE inhibitors are dangerous here…”
Tap the timestamp pill — player jumps back to 6:42, transcript highlights the line. You verify the card in 3 seconds.
3. Save the cards you want, skip the rest
Not every card is useful — some are too obvious, some overlap with AnKing. Tap the bookmark on the 5 or 6 genuinely incremental cards. The rest are gone when you close the deck.
4. Export to Anki
Top-right menu → Export to Anki (CSV). Standard tab-separated file. Open Anki desktop, File → Import, pick your deck (create a “NoteTube” subdeck if you want), done. Cards land with tags: notetube bnb-cardiovascular-pharm so you can filter them in the Anki browser later.
5. Review alongside AnKing
Add the NoteTube cards to the same Anki profile you use for AnKing. Anki’s scheduler treats them like any other card. Your daily review queue now includes canonical content (AnKing) plus the specific BnB facts you personally captured.
Why timestamp jump-back matters
Most flashcard generators give you a card and leave you trusting the AI. Students correctly push back — if I can’t verify where this fact came from, I won’t put it in my long-term review.
Anchoring every card to a second in the video removes that worry. Click the timestamp, see the exact moment Dr. Ryan said it, move on. This is the single biggest reason MS1/MS2 users trust the generated cards enough to actually export them to Anki.
Works with the full USMLE video canon
- Boards and Beyond (Dr. Jason Ryan)
- Sketchy Medical (Pharm, Path, Micro)
- Pathoma (Dr. Sattar)
- Ninja Nerd (any)
- Dirty Medicine
- Randy Neil EKG
- AnKing pharm videos (ironically)
- First Aid reading recordings if you have them
Anything with captions works — auto-generated captions from YouTube are fine. You do not need a perfect manual transcript.
Deck sharing for study groups
When a classmate makes a good deck for a specific BnB lecture — say, a curated 12-card deck for “Acute Leukemias” that mixes BnB, Sketchy, and the Pathoma chapter — they can publish it as a link (something like notetube.ai/d/xk9a2b). Drop that link in your class GroupMe. Anyone who taps it gets the 12 cards imported into their own Anki export with one tap. The original author never sees who imported.
This is the AnKing-style loop but for the specific lectures your class actually watches together, without needing to maintain a shared AnkiHub deck.
Pricing for med students
- Free: 5 flashcard decks per week. Enough to generate decks for ~1 hour of daily BnB watching in your first week.
- Premium: $9.99/month or $79/year. 100 decks per week — full-tilt study pace during dedicated — plus 20 playlist-to-course conversions, Notion sync, and priority AI. Cheaper than one UWorld week extension.
No ads. No dark patterns. You can cancel any time and your cards stay exported.
FAQ
Do I need to replace AnKing?
No. NoteTube sits alongside AnKing. AnKing covers the canon. NoteTube captures the lecture-specific stuff. Your Anki desktop shows both.
What about videos I already watched weeks ago?
Open them in NoteTube now and regenerate cards. The YouTube transcript is still there. You can build a “catch-up” deck of old BnB lectures you never captured.
Can I edit a card before exporting?
Yes. Long-press any card to edit front, back, or timestamp before saving.
Does it work for Step 2 / Shelf exams?
Same mechanism. Works for Divine Intervention, Emma Holliday, whatever lectures your Step 2 flow leans on.
What happens if NoteTube shuts down?
Every deck has been exported to Anki CSV or Obsidian Markdown before that point. Your cards are yours. NoteTube is an import pipeline, not a storage lock-in.
Ready to try
Free tier, no credit card. Install NoteTube AI, paste a BnB link, generate a deck in 20 seconds. Keep it if useful, delete it if not — either way you’ve lost nothing but a minute.
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