What is video-transcript-downloader?

A command-line tool for getting transcripts and downloading videos, audio, subtitles, or selected formats from online videos.

Printing clean transcripts, optionally with timestamps, downloading media or subtitles, and listing or choosing available formats.

It turns available captions into readable text and provides controlled downloads when media files are needed.

video-transcript-downloader — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by steipete: A command-line tool for getting transcripts and downloading video

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.

agentmods

npx agentmods add skills/steipete/agent-scripts/video-transcript-downloader

Any agent

npx skills add steipete/agent-scripts --skill video-transcript-downloader

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/steipete/agent-scripts

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/steipete/agent-scripts/video-transcript-downloader.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/steipete/agent-scripts/video-transcript-downloader)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/steipete/agent-scripts/video-transcript-downloader"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/steipete/agent-scripts/video-transcript-downloader.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Per session 23 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 593 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5	$0.00023	$0.00593
Opus 5	$0.00012	$0.00296
Sonnet 5	$0.00005	$0.00119
Haiku 4.5	$0.00002	$0.00059

Measured 4d ago against content hash 27153a8c523e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

video-transcript-downloader 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 1 executable file (scripts/vtd.js), 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

video-transcript-downloader — 95% identical, 30 lines differ

skills/video-transcript-downloader/SKILL.md · 92 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 92 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Video Transcript Downloader

./scripts/vtd.js can:

Print a transcript as a clean paragraph (timestamps optional).
Download video/audio/subtitles.

Transcript behavior:

YouTube: fetch via youtube-transcript-plus when possible.
Otherwise: pull subtitles via yt-dlp, then clean into a paragraph.

Setup

cd ~/Projects/agent-scripts/skills/video-transcript-downloader && npm ci

CLI syntax:

./scripts/vtd.js --help
./scripts/vtd.js transcript --help

Subcommands support focused help without requiring --url.

Transcript (default: clean paragraph)

./scripts/vtd.js transcript --url 'https://…'
./scripts/vtd.js transcript --url 'https://…' --lang en
./scripts/vtd.js transcript --url 'https://…' --timestamps
./scripts/vtd.js transcript --url 'https://…' --keep-brackets

Download video / audio / subtitles

./scripts/vtd.js download --url 'https://…' --output-dir ~/Downloads
./scripts/vtd.js audio --url 'https://…' --output-dir ~/Downloads
./scripts/vtd.js subs --url 'https://…' --output-dir ~/Downloads --lang en

Formats (list + choose)

List available formats (format ids, resolution, container, audio-only, etc):

./scripts/vtd.js formats --url 'https://…'

Download a specific format id (example):

./scripts/vtd.js download --url 'https://…' --output-dir ~/Downloads -- --format 137+140

Prefer MP4 container without re-encoding (remux when possible):

./scripts/vtd.js download --url 'https://…' --output-dir ~/Downloads -- --remux-video mp4

Notes

Default transcript output is a single paragraph. Use --timestamps only when asked.
Bracketed cues like [Music] are stripped by default; keep them via --keep-brackets.
Pass extra yt-dlp args after -- for transcript fallback, download, audio, subs, formats.

./scripts/vtd.js formats --url 'https://…' -- -v

Troubleshooting (only when needed)

Missing yt-dlp / ffmpeg:

brew install yt-dlp ffmpeg

Read the full file on GitHub · 92 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 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.

4d ago First seen · 92 lines · 23 tokens per session scan A 27153a8c523e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

video-transcript-downloader is a skill published in the GitHub repository steipete/agent-scripts (6,590 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 23 tokens to every session and 593 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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