youtube-transcript

YouTube Transcript (via DeepAPI, yt-dlp fallback)

Fetch a YouTube video's transcript and save a clean raw .txt file. Primary path is DeepAPI POST /v1/scrape/youtube/transcript. It runs server-side, so it avoids the local-IP bot flagging that plagues yt-dlp.

Save location

• If the user is in a real project/working dir → save there.
• Otherwise (no dir given, or cwd makes no sense) → save to ~/Downloads.
• Always name the file Channel_Title with spaces replaced by _ (e.g. David_Ondrej_title_of_video.txt). If metadata is unavailable, fall back to the video ID.

Primary path — DeepAPI

Key lives in ~/.zshrc as DEEPAPI_API_KEY. Do NOT source ~/.zshrc (breaks the shell, exit 126):

KEY=${DEEPAPI_API_KEY:-$(rg -o 'DEEPAPI_API_KEY=\S+' ~/.zshrc | head -1 | cut -d= -f2)}
BASE=${DEEPAPI_API_BASE_URL:-https://deepapi.co}

Run the scrape (keep the Idempotency-Key; retries must reuse the SAME one):

IDK=$(uuidgen)
curl -s --max-time 120 "$BASE/v1/scrape/youtube/transcript" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: $IDK" \
  -d '{"url": "VIDEO_URL", "maxCostUsd": "0.05", "waitForFinishSecs": 60}' \
  > /tmp/yt_transcript.json

• Non-English videos: add "language": "de" (etc.) to the body.
• status: running → wait next.afterSecs, then curl "$BASE$(jq -r '.next.path' /tmp/yt_transcript.json)" -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" until succeeded or failed.

Extract the text and save it:

jq -r '.status' /tmp/yt_transcript.json                # succeeded | running | failed
jq -r '.output[0].text' /tmp/yt_transcript.json > "$OUT/$NAME.txt"
jq -r '.debitMicrousd' /tmp/yt_transcript.json         # cost (50000 = $0.05)

.output[0].segments also has timed segments (startSecs, durationSecs, text) if the user wants timestamps. Empty output = video has no captions; report it, don't retry.

For the Channel_Title filename, get metadata with a quick yt-dlp --print "%(channel)s|%(title)s" --skip-download "URL"; if that fails, use the video ID.