• Tweet

Want to read TV shows or movies on your eReader? StoryBoard is a utility that lets you do that. Yep, you read that right: Storyboard takes a video file and turns it into a PDF featuring still images and text from a movie or TV show.

Here’s  how it works: Storyboard detects scene changes in a video file and grabs a still image of the relevant frame. It also grabs an image every time the subtitles change.

If your video doesn’t already have subtitles, the script can try to identify the movie or TV episode and grab relevant subtitles from the internet.

The end result is a PDF eBook featuring a series of photos with captions for the text. You can then read a TV show as if it were a picture book — which is a pretty good way to zip through an hour-long TV show in a matter of minutes.

You can also read that PDF file on an eReader, smartphone, tablet, or a laptop.

This isn’t the first time we’e seen this sort of trick. Developer Mark Longstaff-Tyrell came up with something similar a while back and called it iPlayer for Kindle.

But developer Mark Olson’s Storyboard is a bit more sophisticated — and it’s an open source project. You can access the source code at Github, or contribute to development of the project if you want to help add support for EPUB, Mobi, or other formats, for instance.

The tool is also available for installation on a Mac or Linux computer. You can find instructions at Olson’s website.