Video breakdown

Video Breakdown

Reverse-engineer any video the way you actually watch one: visuals + audio at the same time. Built for competitor teardowns and ripping apart trending content in your niche.

How it works

No video model. The skill splits the video into the two things Claude reads natively — images (frames) and text (transcript) — with timestamps lined up, so Claude knows what's on screen the moment something is said.

1. yt-dlp pulls the video + auto-captions from almost any site (YouTube, Loom, IG, TikTok) or a local file.
2. ffmpeg rips frames at every scene change (falls back to interval sampling for static talking-heads), capped at ~80.
3. Captions become a clean timestamped transcript.txt (no captions = on-screen text in frames still carries it).
4. Claude reads the frames + transcript and writes the breakdown.

Run it

bash ~/.claude/skills/video-breakdown/scripts/grab.sh "<url-or-path>" [slug] [--start MM:SS] [--end MM:SS] [--every N]

• slug — folder name (auto-derived if omitted)
• --start / --end — only analyze a window
• --every N — seconds between frames when falling back to interval sampling (default 3)

Output lands in ~/claude-watch/library/<slug>/:

• frames/frame_*.jpg — the visuals
• frames/times.txt — ffmpeg pts_time per frame (maps frame number → timestamp)
• transcript.txt — [MM:SS] line format
• pacing.txt — cut-rhythm summary (cut count, first-cut time, avg gap, slow-open/static/fast flags). Heuristic from ffmpeg scene detection, not a motion read.
• meta.txt — title, source, frame count

Then (Claude's job)

1. Read transcript.txt fully.
2. Read the frames. Use times.txt to know when each frame happens, so visuals align to the script.
3. Produce the teardown. Default structure (adapt to what you asked for):
   • TLDR — one line on why this video works
   • Hook — first 0–3s, exact words + what's on screen
   • Structure — beat-by-beat with timestamps (acts, retention turns, CTA)
   • Visual playbook — cuts, text overlays, b-roll, motion, pacing
   • Why it's trending / what to steal — the transferable moves
   • If asked: graphics/motion prompts, script template, hook variations for a niche

Notes

• Caption-less sources (often IG/TikTok, local files): grab.sh falls back to local whisper.cpp (whisper-cli + ~/.cache/whisper-cpp/ggml-small.en.bin, no API key, on-device, wired in 2026-07-05). If whisper-cli or the model is missing, transcript says NO_CAPTIONS. Lean on frames + on-screen text, say so rather than guessing audio.
• Everything runs locally. No content leaves the machine except the original yt-dlp fetch.
• Frame folder is wiped + rebuilt on each run for the same slug.