youtube-transcribe-skill

youtube-transcribe-skill is a skill for Claude Code from feiskyer/claude-code-settings. It costs 50 tokens per session (1,162 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A tool for getting subtitles or transcripts from YouTube videos and saving them as local files.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to extract English or Chinese captions from YouTube videos, including standard videos and Shorts.
Why use it?
It removes the need to copy captions manually or listen through a video to create a text version.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: $ARGUMENTS substitution.

Part of the claude-code-settings plugin — 12 skills, 9 agents, 1 MCP server shipped together

Good fit Use it to extract English or Chinese captions from YouTube videos, including standard videos and Shorts.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/feiskyer/claude-code-settings/youtube-transcribe-skill
About the project

Claude Code Skills & Agents is a collection of reusable skills, sub-agents, and configuration templates that extend Claude Code with workflows such as research, image generation, translation, and GitHub automation. It is for Claude Code users who want to install these capabilities individually or as a marketplace plugin. The catalogue entries are components from this collection.

feiskyer/claude-code-settings · 1,647 stars · on GitHub · feisky.xyz

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.

Any agent
npx skills add feiskyer/claude-code-settings --skill youtube-transcribe-skill
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/feiskyer/claude-code-settings

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install claude-code-settings, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 12 skills, 9 agents, 1 MCP server.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for youtube-transcribe-skill

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/feiskyer/claude-code-settings/youtube-transcribe-skill.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/feiskyer/claude-code-settings/youtube-transcribe-skill)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/feiskyer/claude-code-settings/youtube-transcribe-skill"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/feiskyer/claude-code-settings/youtube-transcribe-skill.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 50 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,162 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high YARA Match · line 30
    YARA rule matched a known malware signature (reverse shell, backdoor, ransomware, C2 framework, or info stealer).
    Fix: Remove the malware payload or compromised file entirely. Investigate how it entered the skill and audit all other artifacts for additional indicators of compromise.
How audits are shown
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 5.1 $0.00050 $0.01162
Opus 5 $0.00025 $0.00581
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00232
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00116

Measured 9d ago against content hash 60da210e6c07, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

youtube-transcribe-skill 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 9d 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.

skills/youtube-transcribe-skill/SKILL.md · 120 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 120 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

YouTube Transcript Extraction

Extract subtitles/transcripts from a YouTube video URL and save them as a local file.

Input YouTube URL: $ARGUMENTS

Step 1: Verify URL

Confirm the input is a valid YouTube URL (supports youtube.com/watch?v=, youtu.be/, and youtube.com/shorts/ formats). If no URL is provided via arguments, check the conversation context for a YouTube link.

Step 2: CLI Quick Extraction (Priority Attempt)

Use command-line tools to quickly extract subtitles.

2.1 Check Tool Availability

Execute which yt-dlp.

  • If yt-dlp is found, proceed to 2.2.
  • If yt-dlp is not found, skip to Step 3.

2.2 Get Video Title

yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser=chrome --get-title "[VIDEO_URL]"
  • Tip: Always add --cookies-from-browser to avoid sign-in restrictions. Default to chrome.
  • If it fails with a browser error (e.g., "Could not open Chrome"), ask the user to specify their available browser (e.g., firefox, safari, edge) and retry.

2.3 Download Subtitles

yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser=chrome --write-auto-sub --write-sub --sub-lang zh-Hans,zh-Hant,en --skip-download --output "<Video Title>.%(ext)s" "[VIDEO_URL]"

2.4 Convert to Plain Text

yt-dlp saves subtitles as .vtt or .srt files. Convert the downloaded file to plain Timestamp Text format:

  1. Read the downloaded subtitle file (.vtt or .srt).
  2. Strip VTT/SRT headers, styling tags, and duplicate lines.
  3. Save as <Video Title>.txt with one Timestamp Text entry per line.

2.5 Verify Results

  • Exit code 0: Convert and save the subtitle file, then report completion.
  • Exit code non-0:
    • If error is related to browser/cookies, ask user for correct browser and retry.
    • If other errors (e.g., video unavailable), proceed to Step 3.

Step 3: Browser Automation (Fallback)

When the CLI method fails or yt-dlp is missing, use Chrome DevTools MCP to extract subtitles via browser UI automation.

3.1 Check Tool Availability

Read the full file on GitHub · 120 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. 9d ago First seen · 120 lines · 50 tokens per session scan A 60da210e6c07

Subscribe to this mod's changes

youtube-transcribe-skill is a skill published in the GitHub repository feiskyer/claude-code-settings (1,647 stars, last pushed 26d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 50 tokens to every session and 1,162 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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