youtube-transcript

youtube-transcript is a skill for Claude Code from glebis/claude-skills. It costs 57 tokens per session (547 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A tool that turns YouTube subtitles into timestamped Markdown notes, including video details and chapter headings, and saves them in an Obsidian vault. Obsidian is an app for storing linked plain-text notes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to turn YouTube lectures, talks, interviews, or tutorials into searchable notes for later reading and research.
Why use it?
It removes the need to watch a whole video while manually copying subtitles, timestamps, and metadata into your notes.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the youtube-transcript plugin — 1 skill shipped together

Good fit Use it to turn YouTube lectures, talks, interviews, or tutorials into searchable notes for later reading and research.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/glebis/claude-skills/youtube-transcript
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 glebis/claude-skills --skill youtube-transcript
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/glebis/claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install youtube-transcript, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill.

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-transcript

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/glebis/claude-skills/youtube-transcript.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/glebis/claude-skills/youtube-transcript)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/glebis/claude-skills/youtube-transcript"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/glebis/claude-skills/youtube-transcript.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 57 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 547 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 pass 7 Sept 2026
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 $0.00057 $0.00547
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00273
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00109
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00055

Measured 4d ago against content hash b7ea7c712570, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

youtube-transcript 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 4d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (scripts/deduplicate_transcript.py, scripts/extract_transcript.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

youtube-transcript/SKILL.md · 91 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 91 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

YouTube Transcript

Overview

Extract YouTube video transcripts, metadata, and chapters using yt-dlp. Output formatted as Markdown with YAML frontmatter, saved to ~/Brains/brain/ (Obsidian vault).

Quick Start

To extract a transcript from a YouTube video:

python scripts/extract_transcript.py <youtube_url>

Optional: Specify custom output filename:

python scripts/extract_transcript.py <youtube_url> custom_filename.md

Output Format

YAML Frontmatter

The generated Markdown includes comprehensive metadata:

  • title - Video title
  • channel - Channel name
  • url - YouTube URL
  • upload_date - Upload date (YYYY-MM-DD)
  • duration - Video duration (HH:MM:SS)
  • description - Video description (truncated to 500 chars)
  • tags - Array of video tags
  • view_count - View count
  • like_count - Like count

Body Structure

Transcript organized by video chapters (if available):

## Chapter Title

**00:05:23** Transcript text for this segment.

**00:05:45** Next segment text.

If no chapters exist, all content appears under "## Transcript" heading.

Timestamps formatted as HH:MM:SS for consistency.

Workflow

  1. Extract metadata and subtitles using yt-dlp
  2. Parse VTT subtitle format to extract timestamps and text
  3. Group transcript segments by video chapters (if present)
  4. Format as Markdown with YAML frontmatter
  5. Save to ~/Brains/brain/ with sanitized filename based on video title
  6. Clean up temporary subtitle files

Deduplication

To remove duplicates from existing transcript files:

python scripts/deduplicate_transcript.py <markdown_file>

This removes transcript entries that are prefixes of subsequent entries (common in VTT files where subtitles accumulate).

Requirements

Ensure yt-dlp is installed:

pip install yt-dlp

Limitations

  • Extracts subtitles in English first, falls back to Russian if English unavailable
  • Requires video to have subtitles (auto-generated or manual)
  • Does not download video or audio files
  • Description truncated to 500 characters in frontmatter

Read the full file on GitHub · 91 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 4d ago First seen · 91 lines · 57 tokens per session scan A b7ea7c712570

Subscribe to this mod's changes

youtube-transcript is a skill published in the GitHub repository glebis/claude-skills (374 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 57 tokens to every session and 547 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 2026-09-03.

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