Youtube transcribe

YouTube / Audio Transcription

Turn a YouTube video — or any local audio/video file — into a transcript without relying on YouTube-provided captions. Many videos (especially re-uploads and some Chinese-language uploads) have no subtitles and no auto-captions, so downloading captions with yt-dlp --write-subs returns nothing. This skill sidesteps that by downloading the audio and transcribing it locally with a whisper engine chosen by platform.

When to reach for this

• The user gives a YouTube URL and wants the 字幕 / 逐字稿 / transcript / captions.
• yt-dlp --list-subs reports has no subtitles / has no automatic captions.
• The user has a local .m4a/.mp3/.mp4/etc. file to transcribe.

Prerequisites

• uv installed (used to run yt-dlp and the transcription script without polluting the global env). The script auto-selects the whisper engine and uv installs only the one your platform needs:
  • Apple Silicon Mac → mlx-whisper (MLX/Metal, GPU-accelerated).
  • Intel Mac / Linux / Windows → faster-whisper (CTranslate2, CPU or NVIDIA CUDA).
• A JavaScript runtime — node, bun, or deno — on PATH. Recent yt-dlp needs one to extract YouTube; the script auto-detects whichever is present.
• ffmpeg recommended but not required: if absent, the script falls back to macOS's built-in afconvert (so on non-macOS, install ffmpeg).

Usage

The whole pipeline is one self-contained script. Run it with uv run so dependencies are provisioned automatically:

uv run ~/.claude/skills/youtube-transcribe/scripts/yt_transcribe.py \
  "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID" \
  --output-dir /tmp/whisper_out

Common options:

• --language zh — force a language instead of auto-detecting (faster, avoids mis-detection on bilingual intros).
• --model mlx-community/whisper-large-v3-turbo — the default; good speed/quality on Apple Silicon. Swap for mlx-community/whisper-large-v3 for max quality or a smaller model for speed.
• --output-name my-video — base filename for outputs (defaults to the video id).
• --formats txt,srt — pick which outputs to write (default txt,srt,json).

A local file works the same way — just pass a path instead of a URL:

uv run ~/.claude/skills/youtube-transcribe/scripts/yt_transcribe.py /path/to/talk.m4a --language en

The first run downloads the whisper model (~1.6 GB for turbo) into the Hugging Face cache; later runs reuse it.

Outputs

Written to --output-dir (default: current directory), named after the video id (or --output-name):

• <name>.txt — plain-text transcript (one blob).
• <name>.srt — subtitles with timestamps.
• <name>.json — full result incl. per-segment timestamps and detected language.

After transcribing

The raw whisper output reflects the spoken language verbatim. If the audio is Mandarin, whisper emits Simplified Chinese. Per the user's global rule, when presenting the transcript in chat, convert it to 正體中文 (Traditional) and clean up obvious mis-hearings of proper nouns / technical terms (model names, CVE ids, tool names). Offer a tidied, sectioned summary rather than dumping the full wall of text, and tell the user where the full files live.

How it works (and why)

1. Download audio — yt-dlp -f "bestaudio[ext=m4a]/bestaudio". Format 140 (128 kbps m4a) downloads without solving YouTube's player JS "n" challenge, so we avoid --remote-components ejs:github (it fetches+runs remote code and is typically blocked by the sandbox). The script prefixes uvx if yt-dlp isn't installed, and adds --js-runtimes <node|bun|deno> for whichever runtime exists.
2. Normalize audio — convert to 16 kHz mono 16-bit WAV with ffmpeg, or macOS afconvert if ffmpeg is missing.
3. Transcribe — read the WAV into a numpy float32 array and pass it straight to the engine (mlx_whisper.transcribe(...) on Apple Silicon, faster_whisper.WhisperModel.transcribe(...) elsewhere). Both produce the same normalized result shape (text / language / segments). Handing whisper a decoded array means it never shells out to ffmpeg internally — which is the usual cause of FileNotFoundError: ffmpeg on machines without it.

Troubleshooting

• has no subtitles but you still want text — that's exactly this skill's job; proceed to transcribe the audio.
• FileNotFoundError: ffmpeg — shouldn't happen via this script (it converts first), but if you call the whisper engine directly on an m4a, convert to WAV first.
• On non-Apple-Silicon and conversion fails — afconvert is macOS-only, so install ffmpeg (Linux/Windows have no built-in fallback).
• yt-dlp warns about JS challenge / "Only images are available" — ensure node/bun/deno is on PATH; the script needs one for extraction. Do not reach for --remote-components ejs:github to fix it.
• Garbled / wrong-language output — pass --language explicitly.