consulting-pdf-from-youtube

Consulting PDF from YouTube

Core principle: Subtitle-first, Whisper-last — with quality gates at every step.

YouTube auto-generated subtitles (via yt-dlp --write-auto-subs) are available for the vast majority of videos. They download in seconds and avoid the 30–90+ minute Whisper transcription pipeline with its systematic proper-noun errors.

Transcription priority chain:

1. 🥇 YouTube auto-subs — download with yt-dlp --write-auto-subs --sub-langs (seconds)
2. 🥈 Whisper fallback — if auto-subs fail the quality gate (too sparse, garbled, or absent): download audio → transcribe with faster-whisper → verify quality → verify proper nouns (minutes to hours)
3. 🥉 Flag to user — if Whisper output also fails quality check, inform the user and ask whether to proceed with lower-quality output or try alternatives (OpenAI Whisper API, different model size)

Only fall back to Whisper/faster-whisper when:

• The video has zero auto-subs in any language
• The auto-subs fail the quality gate (Step 2b: file size <1KB/min, entries <2/min, or garbled content)
• The user explicitly wants higher transcription accuracy than auto-subs can provide

Use this skill when:

• The user shares a YouTube link and wants a consulting-style PDF report
• The user provides a local video file path (MP4, MOV, etc.) and wants a Chinese consulting report
• The user shares a social-media video URL (X/Twitter, Bilibili, etc.) and wants a consulting report

The deliverable is always:

• consulting-style PDF report (Chinese or English source → Chinese output)
• transcript-based analysis
• key takeaways / insights
• professional visual styling

Also use this skill for social-video consulting reports beyond YouTube (especially X/Twitter videos) when the requested deliverable is still a polished Chinese consulting-style PDF with transcript-based analysis, critical thinking, and/or fact verification. For X/Twitter sources, combine this workflow with x-video-download-normalization: download and verify the MP4 first, then extract audio/keyframes and continue with the report pipeline below.

Also use it for multi-platform public-video evidence reports: when the user asks to research people/topics across YouTube, Bilibili, Douyin/TikTok, Reddit, X, etc.; extract influential quotes/highlights; preserve timestamps/source links; analyze influence/controversy/bans; and deliver a Chinese PDF. In this class of task, treat each quoted item as evidence with an explicit status: 字幕直引 / 章节标题 / 标题或描述定位 / 二级解读 / 未验证，不作证据. Do not invent quotes to fill platform coverage gaps.

Video download is optional for YouTube because metadata + subtitles may be enough. For Bilibili/search-result-only sources, browser DOM extraction of titles, URLs, view counts, durations, and publish dates may be sufficient for a source table, but avoid claiming exact quotes unless subtitles/video content were directly inspected. For Douyin/Reddit or other blocked platforms, record the access limitation and exclude unverifiable claims from the evidence table. For X/Twitter and other social videos without caption APIs, full video download is usually required so you can extract audio and frames.