youtube-clip-extractor

A workflow for turning a YouTube video into short, publishable clips. It downloads the video and transcript, finds promising moments, cuts them with FFmpeg, and prepares on-screen text and captions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Extracting compelling clips from YouTube videos, selecting moments from transcripts, cutting video files, and creating platform-ready hooks, captions, and on-screen text.
Why use it?
It removes the manual work of searching a long video for good segments and preparing each clip for publication. It also organizes the downloaded video, subtitles, and extracted clips.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/cdeistopened/skill-stack/youtube-clip-extractor
Any agent
npx skills add cdeistopened/skill-stack --skill youtube-clip-extractor
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cdeistopened/skill-stack

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 43 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,834 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00043 $0.04834
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.02417
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00967
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00483

Measured 3d ago against content hash f117e9ef6763, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

youtube-clip-extractor scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.claude/skills/youtube-clip-extractor/SKILL.md · 626 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 626 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

YouTube Clip Extractor

Overview

This skill downloads YouTube videos, analyzes transcripts for compelling clip moments, extracts clips using ffmpeg, and generates platform-ready on-screen text and captions. It integrates with the existing caption and social content skills to deliver complete, publishable assets.

When to Use This Skill

  • You have a YouTube URL and want to extract the best clips
  • You want automated clip identification based on hook/coda criteria
  • You need clips cut and ready for Descript or other editors
  • You want on-screen text hooks and platform-specific captions for each clip

Do NOT use for:

  • Full podcast production workflow (use podcast-production skill instead)
  • Text-only social posts (use social-content-creation skill)
  • Already-downloaded videos (skip to Phase 2)

Prerequisites

Required Tools (install via Homebrew)

brew install yt-dlp ffmpeg

File Location

All downloads go to your project's transcript folder (customizable).

Structure:

transcripts/
├── {video_id}.mp4              # Full video (H.264 encoded)
├── {video_id}.en.vtt           # Timestamped subtitles
└── clips/
    └── {video_id}/
        ├── clip_01_{name}.mp4  # Individual clips
        ├── clip_02_{name}.mp4
        └── {video_id}_Clip_Assets.md  # Captions & hooks

The 4-Phase Workflow

Phase 1: Download Video & Transcript

Goal: Get video and subtitles from YouTube URL

Option A: Transcript-First (Recommended)

Download transcript first, identify clips, then download only needed segments. See Phase 1.5.

Option B: Full Download

If you need the entire video, use H.264 format for Descript compatibility (NOT AV1):

# Download video in H.264 format (Descript-compatible)
yt-dlp -f "bestvideo[vcodec^=avc]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[vcodec^=avc]" \
  --merge-output-format mp4 \
  -o "transcripts/{video_id}.mp4" \
  "YOUTUBE_URL"

# If H.264 unavailable, download best quality then re-encode:
yt-dlp -f "bestvideo+bestaudio" --merge-output-format mp4 \
  -o "transcripts/{video_id}_temp.mp4" \
  "YOUTUBE_URL"

# Re-encode to H.264 for Descript compatibility
ffmpeg -i "{video_id}_temp.mp4" -c:v libx264 -preset fast -crf 22 \
  -c:a aac -b:a 128k "{video_id}.mp4"

Read the full file on GitHub · 626 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 626 lines · 43 tokens per session scan A f117e9ef6763

Subscribe to this mod's changes

youtube-clip-extractor is a skill published in the GitHub repository cdeistopened/skill-stack (27 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 43 tokens to every session and 4,834 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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