NVIDIA AI Blueprint for Video Search and Summarization (VSS) is a reference architecture for applications that use AI to search, analyze, question, and summarize live or recorded video. It is intended for building video analytics agents with vision-language models, language models, retrieval-augmented generation, and NVIDIA NIM microservices. The catalogue entries provide coding-agent rules, skills, commands, agents, instructions, and settings associated with the project.
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.
npx skills add NVIDIA-AI-Blueprints/video-search-and-summarization --skill vss-ask-videogit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/NVIDIA-AI-Blueprints/video-search-and-summarizationWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nvidia-ai-blueprints/video-search-and-summarization/vss-ask-video)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nvidia-ai-blueprints/video-search-and-summarization/vss-ask-video"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nvidia-ai-blueprints/video-search-and-summarization/vss-ask-video/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nvidia-ai-blueprints/video-search-and-summarization/vss-ask-video"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nvidia-ai-blueprints/video-search-and-summarization/vss-ask-video.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium
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 →
- medium Excessive Agency · line 120 Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00106 | $0.05106 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00042 | $0.02042 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00021 | $0.01021 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00011 | $0.00511 |
Grade A, and why
vss-ask-video 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 26d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 436 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Ask a VSS video question
When to Use
- Answer a question about previously analyzed or freshly scoped VSS video
- Read a stored VSS memory job or record by id
- Answer a question that requires running
vss memory introspect - Answer a directly scoped URL, file, or sensor-window question via
vss vlm run
Not for video retrieval or metadata-answerable questions.
Answer from the cheapest grounded source that can satisfy the question. For a
running VSS deployment, use the installed vss CLI. Do not call an
OpenAI-compatible /chat/completions endpoint directly or fall back to raw REST
when a CLI command fails.
This skill does not call POST /generate on the VSS agent. It requires a
deployed VSS with vss configure already run.
Hard rule — use the
vssCLI.vss configurehas already pointed it at the deployment's proxy, so every VSS action goes through that CLI and nothing reaches the deployment any other way.Four things follow, because each has been done instead:
- use the
vsson PATH (see Prerequisites) and call it asvss. Do not build a parallel virtualenv or wrap it in another launcher;vss vlm runis the only eye on the video - never post to/v1/chat/completions,/generateor/v1/summarizeyourself, and never decode or sample frames and answer from them;- a named sensor is
--sensor, never a file, and its window goes in--start-time/--end-time, not the prompt. A name the deployment knows as a sensor stays a sensor even when a file of that name sits on disk: that file is a copy someone left behind, and--fileon it drops the recorded timeline the window flags need, so the window is rejected and the call looks worth retrying;- a failing call is a finding: report the exit code rather than routing around it, repairing the deployment, or looking again.
Prerequisites
The vss CLI on PATH. The OpenClaw and Hermes harness images ship it; anywhere else, install it from the same checkout as this skill so the CLI and the skill match: uv tool install <checkout>/libs/vss/cli.
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.
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.
- 26d ago Changed 371203d42144
- 1mo ago Changed · +9 lines f81be2bb4fec
- 1mo ago Changed 64f364c3a7b4
- 1mo ago Changed · +9 lines 9a890d3e95a1
- 1mo ago Changed · -78 lines 1e8a26064945
- 1mo ago Changed · +50 lines 7a556f56b40b
- 1mo ago Changed · +83 lines · +46 tokens per session be5a6a4660bd
- 1mo ago Changed · +5 lines 20657ae68966
- 1mo ago Changed · +106 lines · -5 tokens per session d349e4aafb6e
- 1mo ago First seen · 252 lines · 65 tokens per session scan A 415a0ba61a7b
vss-ask-video is a skill published in the GitHub repository NVIDIA-AI-Blueprints/video-search-and-summarization (1,957 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 106 tokens to every session and 5,106 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5.5. 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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