yt-transcript

A workflow that turns a video URL into plain text. It uses YouTube captions when available, or transcribes the audio locally when captions are missing.

In plain words
What is it for?
Getting transcripts for video summaries, quotes, and questions about a video's content. The transcript does not include speaker names or timestamps.
Why use it?
It makes video content searchable and usable without watching the entire recording, while accounting for the slower processing needed when captions are unavailable.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/ykdojo/yt-transcript/yt-transcript
Any agent
npx skills add ykdojo/yt-transcript --skill yt-transcript
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ykdojo/yt-transcript

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 59 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 560 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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00059 $0.00560
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.00280
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00112
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00056

Measured 2d ago against content hash d4020bf9cf54, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

yt-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 2d 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/yt-transcript/SKILL.md · 44 lines

What it actually says

Produces a plain-text transcript for a video URL.

Steps:

  1. Find the script: find ~/.claude -name "transcript.sh" -path "*/yt-transcript/*" 2>/dev/null | sort -V | tail -1
  2. Run it:
    <scripts-dir>/transcript.sh "<url>" -o /tmp/transcript.txt
    
    • Without -o it prints to stdout.
    • Progress goes to stderr, so it is safe to redirect stdout.
  3. Read the output file and work from it.

How it decides:

  • If YouTube has captions (manual or auto), it uses those and finishes in seconds. This is the common case.
  • If not, it downloads the audio and transcribes locally with Parakeet TDT.

Important notes:

  • Local transcription is slow. Budget roughly 1 minute of compute per 5 minutes of audio on an Intel Mac. A 77-minute video takes about 15 minutes. Run it in the background and do other work while waiting. Do not run it in the foreground with a short timeout.
  • Livestreams that just ended have no captions yet. YouTube usually generates them within a few hours. If the user is not in a hurry, waiting is far cheaper than transcribing.
  • The transcript has no speaker labels and no timestamps. For a multi-speaker video, attribute quotes only when context makes the speaker unambiguous.
  • Locally transcribed output contains deliberate repeats. Chunks overlap, and each seam is marked with a line like [overlap: the following ~15s of speech repeats the end of the previous section]. Read the span after that marker as the same speech as the end of the section before it, not as the speaker saying something twice. Ignore the duplicate when summarizing, and never quote a passage twice because it appeared on both sides of a seam. Caption-based transcripts have no such markers.
  • ASR makes proper-noun errors. Treat unfamiliar names as suspect, and prefer names that appear consistently across the transcript over one-off spellings.

Setup (first run only): see the repository README for installing yt-dlp, ffmpeg, whisper-cpp, and downloading the Parakeet model.

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. 2d ago First seen · 44 lines · 59 tokens per session scan A d4020bf9cf54

Subscribe to this mod's changes

yt-transcript is a skill published in the GitHub repository ykdojo/yt-transcript (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 59 tokens to every session and 560 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 2026-08-31.