transcribe-video

Video Transcription Skill

Generate subtitles and transcripts from $ARGUMENTS (a video or audio file path, optionally followed by a language code like en-US or es-ES) using AWS Transcribe.

Outputs .srt, .vtt, and .txt files next to the source file.

Process

1. Verify prerequisites - check ffmpeg and aws CLI are installed and configured
2. Extract audio from the video as MP3 using ffmpeg
3. Create temporary S3 bucket, upload audio
4. Run AWS Transcribe job with SRT and VTT subtitle output
5. Download results and generate plain text transcript
6. Clean up all AWS resources - delete S3 bucket, Transcribe job, and temp files. No recurring costs.

Prerequisites

• ffmpeg installed (brew install ffmpeg)
• aws CLI installed and configured with valid credentials (brew install awscli && aws configure)
• AWS credentials need permissions for: s3:* (create/delete buckets), transcribe:* (start/delete jobs)

Step-by-Step

Step 1: Extract audio

ffmpeg -i "input.mp4" -vn -acodec mp3 -q:a 2 "/tmp/transcribe-audio.mp3" -y

Step 2: Create temp S3 bucket and upload

BUCKET="tmp-transcribe-$(date +%s)"
aws s3 mb "s3://$BUCKET" --region us-east-1
aws s3 cp "/tmp/transcribe-audio.mp3" "s3://$BUCKET/audio.mp3"

Step 3: Start transcription job

JOB_NAME="tmp-job-$(date +%s)"
aws transcribe start-transcription-job \
  --transcription-job-name "$JOB_NAME" \
  --language-code en-US \
  --media-format mp3 \
  --media "MediaFileUri=s3://$BUCKET/audio.mp3" \
  --subtitles "Formats=srt,vtt" \
  --output-bucket-name "$BUCKET" \
  --region us-east-1

Language codes: en-US, es-ES, fr-FR, de-DE, pt-BR, ja-JP, zh-CN, it-IT, ko-KR, etc. Default to en-US if not specified.

Step 4: Poll until complete

while true; do
  STATUS=$(aws transcribe get-transcription-job \
    --transcription-job-name "$JOB_NAME" \
    --region us-east-1 \
    --query 'TranscriptionJob.TranscriptionJobStatus' \
    --output text)
  if [ "$STATUS" = "COMPLETED" ] || [ "$STATUS" = "FAILED" ]; then break; fi
  sleep 5
done