youtube-transcribe

YouTube Transcribe

Turn a video — or a whole topic's worth of videos — into text you can actually read and reason over. The point is not to hand back a transcript and stop; it is to absorb what the video teaches and report it back usefully.

Pipeline: find → download → transcribe → (look at frames) → (ask Gemini) → synthesize. Most tasks only need the middle. Reach for the visual steps when the spoken words are not enough.

Setup (once per machine)

S=.claude/skills/youtube-transcribe/scripts
bash "$S/setup.sh"    # creates a venv, installs yt-dlp + elevenlabs + google-genai (idempotent)

If venv creation fails on Debian/Ubuntu, install python3-venv first (sudo apt-get install -y python3-venv).

Keys: transcription reads ELEVENLABS_API_KEY; the Gemini fallback reads GEMINI_API_KEY. Export them, or drop a scripts/load-keys.local.sh that resolves them however you like (the wrappers source it automatically, and it is gitignored so it never ships). Never print a key into your output.

Mode A — one video

S=.claude/skills/youtube-transcribe/scripts
OUT=/tmp/claude/youtube-transcribe/<video-id>        # scratch; never a repo

bash "$S/download.sh"   "<url>" "$OUT" audio          # audio.mp3 + metadata.json
bash "$S/transcribe.sh" "$OUT/audio.mp3" "$OUT"        # transcript.txt + .diarized.txt + .json

Then read `transcript.diarized.txt` (timestamped, speaker-grouped) and write up what matters: the thesis, the steps/method, the concrete claims, the numbers, anything actionable. Skip the filler. If it is a tutorial, capture the actual how; if it is a talk, capture the argument and evidence.

transcribe.sh flags: --no-diarize (single speaker), --lang spa (hint; omit to auto-detect), --keyterms "Kubernetes,PyTorch,yt-dlp" (spell names/jargon right — Scribe will otherwise mangle them, which poisons the summary).

Mode B — a topic (many videos)

Search is free and needs no API key — it uses yt-dlp's own search.

S=.claude/skills/youtube-transcribe/scripts

# 1. Find candidates — pick the good ones by title/channel/duration before spending transcription on them.
bash "$S/search.sh" "quantitative trading with LLMs" 20            # id | duration | channel | title
bash "$S/search.sh" "quantitative trading with LLMs" 20 --date     # sort by newest instead of relevance

# 2. Transcribe the chosen ones in one go (each lands in <OUT>/<video-id>/).
bash "$S/search.sh" "quantitative trading with LLMs" 20 --urls > /tmp/urls.txt
#   ...edit /tmp/urls.txt down to the 10-15 worth watching, then:
bash "$S/batch.sh" /tmp/claude/youtube-transcribe/topic /tmp/urls.txt

Be selective, not exhaustive: a 3-hour stream and a 40-second Short are rarely both worth it. Prefer substance (duration, channel authority, title specificity) over raw view count. Then read every transcript and produce one synthesis across all of them — the consensus, the disagreements, the best single source, and what is still unanswered — not N separate summaries.

Seeing what is on screen

The transcript misses slides, charts, code, dashboards, product shots, and anyone pointing at "this". Two escalating tools:

1. Frames (cheap, local). Download the video, pull stills, and Read the JPGs.

bash "$S/download.sh" "<url>" "$OUT" video                 # video.mp4 (≤720p)
bash "$S/frames.sh"   "$OUT/video.mp4" "$OUT/frames" every 30          # one frame / 30s
bash "$S/frames.sh"   "$OUT/video.mp4" "$OUT/frames" at 00:01:20,00:04:05   # exact moments from the transcript

Use timestamps from transcript.diarized.txt to grab the exact moment someone says "as you can see here".

2. Gemini (last resort, needs GEMINI_API_KEY). When frames are not enough — you need the video understood, on-screen text read, or a direct visual question answered. Gemini ingests the YouTube URL directly (no download); for a local file it uploads first.

bash "$S/ask-gemini.sh" "<url-or-local-mp4>" "What indicators are shown on the chart at minute 4, and what are their values?"

Gemini is the fallback, not the default: transcription is cheaper, faster, and usually sufficient. Go to Gemini only when the answer is genuinely visual.

Output — absorb, do not dump

Default to a tight knowledge digest, not a wall of transcript:

• What it is: title, channel, length, one-line framing.
• Core knowledge: the actual ideas/method/claims, in your own words, dense and specific.
• Notable specifics: numbers, names, tools, steps, quotes worth keeping (with [mm:ss] timestamps).
• Caveats / what's unproven or salesy. Many "educational" videos are funnels — say so plainly.

Keep the raw transcript.txt on disk and point to it; paste quotes, not the whole thing.

Scripts

Notes

• Scratch only. Media and transcripts go in /tmp/claude/youtube-transcribe/…, never in a repo. They can be large.
• Scribe limits: 3 GB / 10 h per file; 90+ languages, auto-detected. A ~12 min talk is a single call.
• Age-restricted / members-only / private videos may need cookies (yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser or --cookies). For Gemini, prefer uploading the downloaded file over passing a URL it cannot reach.
• This is for learning from public videos. Respect copyright and each platform's terms; do not republish someone's content as your own.