youtube-transcript

The youtube-transcript skill provides a direct programmatic interface for retrieving closed captions from any YouTube video. It functions as a specialized wrapper around the youtube-transcript-api, allowing users to pull text data directly from a video URL or unique identifier. The tool supports fetching either raw text for reading or time-stamped segments for reference. By automating the extraction process, it removes the need to manually copy or scrape video content from browser windows. The output is formatted consistently, providing clean, paragraph-based text when timestamps are disabled or structured temporal markers when precision is needed. This ensures that the retrieved data remains faithful to the original caption stream, whether the source content consists of manual professional subtitling or platform-generated automatic captions.

When to Use This Skill

• •Summarizing educational video content for rapid knowledge acquisition
• •Creating searchable text archives of video libraries
• •Extracting quotes from technical tutorials or interviews
• •Generating documentation based on instructional video series

How to Invoke This Skill

Example prompts that trigger this skill in Claude Code, Cursor, or Antigravity:

• “Get the transcript for this YouTube video
• “Extract captions from the video at [URL]
• “Save the text of this YouTube video to a file
• “Provide a timestamped transcript for the video ID [ID]
• “Fetch the subtitles for the YouTube link provided

Pro Tips

• 💡Always specify `--timestamps` if precise timing for each caption segment is crucial for your task, such as video editing or detailed indexing.
• 💡Leverage the default output (without timestamps) for tasks requiring clean, readable text, and consider piping it directly into another AI agent for summarization or rephrasing.
• 💡Combine this skill with a file saving agent to automatically archive transcripts for a series of videos, facilitating batch processing and content management.

What this skill does

• •Extracts full text transcripts from YouTube video URLs or IDs
• •Generates optional timestamped segments in [MM:SS] or [HH:MM:SS] format
• •Automatically detects and pulls the best available caption source
• •Saves output to local text files using video-specific naming conventions
• •Formats plain text output into readable paragraphs by removing line breaks

When not to use it

• ✕Videos that have no captions or subtitles enabled
• ✕Scenarios requiring high-fidelity audio transcription for non-English languages not supported by the video owner
• ✕High-volume, real-time streaming analysis

Example workflow

1. Identify the target YouTube video URL
2. Invoke the script using the video URL as the primary argument
3. Specify the optional --timestamps flag if exact timing is required
4. Review the output generated in the resulting text file
5. Process the paragraph-cleaned text for further summarization

Prerequisites

• –Python environment with uv installed
• –A valid YouTube video with enabled captions
• –Active internet connection for API requests

Pitfalls & limitations

• !Fails if the video author has explicitly disabled captioning
• !Auto-generated captions may contain grammatical errors or inaccuracies
• !Longer videos may experience slight delays depending on transcript length

FAQ

How it compares

Unlike manual copy-pasting from the YouTube UI, this tool automates file creation and provides consistent paragraph grouping, ensuring cleaner data for downstream tasks.

Source & trust

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