Agent-Skills.md

Agent Skills: youtube-captions

Extract captions and transcripts from YouTube videos for agent context. Tries manual subtitles, then auto-generated, then falls back to audio transcription via Whisper. Use when a user provides a YouTube URL and wants to understand, summarize, reference, or search video content.

UncategorizedID: third774/dotfiles/youtube-captions

Repository

third774/dotfiles
third774
5

Install this agent skill to your local

pnpm dlx add-skill https://github.com/third774/dotfiles/tree/HEAD/opencode/skills/youtube-captions

Skill Files

Browse the full folder contents for youtube-captions.

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opencode/skills/youtube-captions/SKILL.md

Skill Metadata

Name
youtube-captions
Description
Extract captions and transcripts from YouTube videos for agent context. Tries manual subtitles, then auto-generated, then falls back to audio transcription via Whisper. Use when a user provides a YouTube URL and wants to understand, summarize, reference, or search video content.

youtube-captions

Extract timestamped captions from YouTube videos. Output is VTT format (timestamps preserved).

Prerequisites

  • yt-dlp — REQUIRED (brew install yt-dlp)
  • openai-whisper — REQUIRED only if video has no subtitles (pip install openai-whisper)
    • First run downloads the small model (~500MB)
    • Transcription is significantly slower than subtitle download

Usage

bash scripts/get-captions.sh <youtube-url> [language]
  • youtube-url — any valid YouTube video URL
  • language — subtitle language code (default: en)

Output goes to stdout. Status messages go to stderr.

Fallback Chain

  1. Manual subtitles — human-uploaded captions (fastest, most accurate)
  2. Auto-generated subtitles — YouTube's speech recognition
  3. Whisper transcription — downloads audio, transcribes locally with whisper --model small

The script tries each step in order and exits on the first success.

Example

# Get English captions
bash scripts/get-captions.sh "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"

# Get Spanish captions
bash scripts/get-captions.sh "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ" es

Output Format

VTT (Web Video Text Tracks) with timestamps:

WEBVTT

00:00:01.000 --> 00:00:04.000
First line of dialogue

00:00:04.000 --> 00:00:08.000
Second line of dialogue

Notes

  • All temporary files (audio, intermediate subtitle files) are cleaned up automatically
  • If neither yt-dlp subtitles nor Whisper are available, the script exits with an error and clear instructions
  • Long videos with no subtitles will take time to transcribe — Whisper processes roughly at 1x realtime on CPU