colonelpanic8/dotfiles/youtube-transcript

YouTube video summaries from closed captions

Nearly every YouTube video ships captions — human-authored or auto-generated. Fetching them costs a couple of seconds and gives you the full content of the video as text. Do that instead of guessing from the title, and never claim you watched a video.

Get the transcript

scripts/yt-transcript.py <url-or-id> -o /tmp/yt-<id>.txt

Paths are relative to this skill's directory. The script writes a header block (title, channel, duration, upload date, caption source) plus the timestamped transcript to the file, and prints the header and a word/token count to stdout. Read the file afterward.

Send output to a file rather than stdout for anything longer than a few minutes — a one-hour talk is roughly 10k words, and you want it as one deliberate read.

Useful flags:

The script uses yt-dlp for metadata and caption-track URLs only — it never downloads video or audio. If yt-dlp is missing from PATH, prefix the command with nix shell nixpkgs#yt-dlp --command.

Then summarize

Lead with what the video actually argues or shows, not a description of its structure. A useful default shape:

1. One or two sentences on what the video is and its central claim or purpose.
2. Key points as a short list, each with a [m:ss] timestamp from the transcript so

the user can jump to it.

1. Anything notable — a surprising claim, a caveat the speaker gives, a conclusion

that differs from the title's implication.

Match length to the ask. "What's this about?" wants three sentences; "summarize this talk" wants the full shape above. If asked a specific question, answer it directly and quote the relevant line with its timestamp rather than summarizing the whole video.

Quote sparingly — short excerpts to support a point. Do not reproduce long stretches of the transcript verbatim, and never reproduce song lyrics; summarize instead.

Caption quality caveats

Auto-generated captions have no speaker labels, no punctuation reliability, and mistranscribe proper nouns and jargon. The header line tells you which kind you got.

• With auto captions, treat unusual names, numbers, and technical terms as suspect.

Say "the speaker refers to what the captions render as X" when it matters.

• Captions carry no visual information. If the video is a demo, chart walkthrough, or

anything where the point is on screen, the transcript will have gaps like "as you can see here" — flag that limitation rather than filling it in.

• Music, applause, and effects appear as [Music]-style markers.

When there are no captions

The script exits with an error listing available languages, or says the video has none. Options, in order:

1. Retry with --list-langs; the content may exist under a different code, or only as

auto-generated (which the default already prefers second).

1. If only a non-English track exists, fetch it with --lang and summarize in English.
2. If there are genuinely no captions, say so. Do not download and transcribe the audio

unless the user explicitly asks — that is a much heavier operation.

Live streams in progress, age-restricted videos, and members-only content may fail at the metadata step. Report the error rather than working around it.