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Video Transcript

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video-transcript

Video Transcript is an Agent Skill for documents published in the majiayu000/claude-skill-registry repository on GitHub: a SKILL.md instruction file an AI agent can load to do this task.

Extract video transcripts: yt-dlp subtitles to clean paragraphs.

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How to use this skill

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  1. Open your project in Codex.
  2. Copy and paste the prompt below.
  3. Review files and risks before approving any action.
Prompt to paste
Inspect the Agent Skill at https://github.com/majiayu000/claude-skill-registry/blob/HEAD/skills/bash/video-transcript/SKILL.md and all supporting files. Report provenance, permissions, scripts, dependencies, and security risks. Propose an exact installation into .agents/skills/video-transcript, but wait for my approval before writing files or running scripts.

Copying this prompt does not install or run the skill. Review third-party files before use.

Video Transcript

Pull a video's transcript as readable paragraphs. Two paths, in order:

Path 1 — uploader subtitles (accurate, prefer when present):

yt-dlp --skip-download --write-subs --sub-langs en --sub-format vtt \
  -o '<work-dir>/%(id)s' '<URL>'

Path 2 — auto-generated captions (fallback when path 1 writes no file):

yt-dlp --skip-download --write-auto-subs --sub-langs en --sub-format vtt \
  -o '<work-dir>/%(id)s' '<URL>'

Then clean the VTT into paragraphs:

python3 skills/research/video-transcript/scripts/vtt_to_paragraph.py <work-dir>/<id>.en.vtt

Default output is plain paragraph text with [Music]-style cues stripped and the rolling duplicates of auto-captions deduplicated. Use --timestamps for [mm:ss] markers, --keep-brackets to keep cue tags, -o FILE to write to a file.

For other languages, change --sub-langs (e.g. de, en.*). List what a video offers with yt-dlp --list-subs '<URL>'.

Error handling

Both paths write no .vtt file

Cause: video has no subtitles or captions in the requested language. Solution: run yt-dlp --list-subs '<URL>' and pick an available language; if none exist, report that and offer audio transcription via the markdown-converter skill on a downloaded audio file.

HTTP 429 / "Sign in to confirm"

Cause: platform rate-limiting the host. Solution: wait and retry with --sleep-requests 2; keep request volume low.

Cleaner output repeats lines

Cause: VTT came from a third path (e.g. translated captions) with cue formats the dedupe misses. Solution: rerun the cleaner; if repeats remain, file the sample VTT alongside a fix to vtt_to_paragraph.py.