short-form

Short-Form Repurposing Engine

Turn a long-form YouTube video into 3-5 short-form clips optimized for Reels, Shorts, and TikTok. Identifies the most clip-worthy moments, generates platform-specific hooks and captions, and provides timestamps for editing.

When This Skill Activates

Activate when the user wants to:

• Create Reels, Shorts, or TikTok clips from a YouTube video
• Repurpose long-form content into short-form
• Identify the best clips from a video
• Generate captions and hooks for short-form content

Example triggers:

• "Create shorts from my latest video"
• "Repurpose this for short-form"
• "What are the best clips from this video?"
• /short-form or /short-form <youtube-url>

Pipeline

Step 1 — Get the Transcript

If the user provided a YouTube URL, use it.

If the user said "latest video", auto-detect:

yt-dlp --flat-playlist --playlist-end 1 --print url --print title "https://www.youtube.com/channel/YOUR_CHANNEL_ID/videos"

Confirm with user: "Found your latest video: [TITLE]. Pulling clips from this one."

Fetch transcript using these methods in order:

Method 1 — Apify:

node "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/content-cascade/scripts/fetch-transcript-apify.js" "<youtube-url>"

Method 2 — youtube-transcript:

node "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/content-cascade/scripts/fetch-transcript.js" "<youtube-url>"

Method 3 — yt-dlp subtitles:

yt-dlp --write-sub --sub-lang en-orig --skip-download --sub-format json3 -o "$TEMP/yt-transcript" "<youtube-url>"

Fall back to --write-auto-sub --sub-lang en if en-orig unavailable.

Parse json3:

node -e "
const fs = require('fs');
const path = require('path');
const dir = process.env.TEMP;
const file = fs.readdirSync(dir).find(f => f.startsWith('yt-transcript') && f.endsWith('.json3'));
if (!file) { console.error('No subtitle file found'); process.exit(1); }
const data = JSON.parse(fs.readFileSync(path.join(dir, file), 'utf8'));
const text = data.events.filter(e => e.segs).map(e => e.segs.map(s => s.utf8 || '').join('')).join(' ').replace(/\n/g, ' ').replace(/\\s+/g, ' ').trim();
console.log(text);
"