youtube-transcript

Original：🇺🇸 English

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Download YouTube video transcripts (subtitles/captions) using yt-dlp. Use this skill whenever the user provides a YouTube URL and wants the transcript, asks to "download transcript", "get captions/subtitles", or "transcribe a YouTube video". Also triggers when user needs text content extracted from any YouTube video, even if they don't explicitly say "transcript" (e.g., "what does this video say", "get me the text from this video", "I need the content of this YouTube link").

2installs

Sourcehoangvantuan/claude-plugin

Added on2026-04-25

NPX Install

npx skill4agent add hoangvantuan/claude-plugin youtube-transcript

SKILL.md Content

View Translation Comparison →

YouTube Transcript Downloader

Download transcript from YouTube video, convert to clean plain text.

Workflow

Follow this exact order. Stop and inform the user if any step fails.

Step 1: Verify yt-dlp

bash

command -v yt-dlp

If not found, install:

macOS:
```
brew install yt-dlp
```
Linux:
```
sudo apt install -y yt-dlp
```
Fallback:
```
pip3 install yt-dlp
```

If installation fails, tell the user to install manually.

Step 2: Get video info and check subtitles

bash

VIDEO_URL="THE_URL"
yt-dlp --print "%(title)s" "$VIDEO_URL"
yt-dlp --list-subs "$VIDEO_URL"

Note what's available: manual subtitles (higher quality) vs auto-generated.

Step 3: Download subtitles

Try in order until one succeeds:

Manual subtitles (best quality):

bash

yt-dlp --write-sub --skip-download --output "transcript_temp" "$VIDEO_URL"

Auto-generated subtitles (fallback):

bash

yt-dlp --write-auto-sub --skip-download --output "transcript_temp" "$VIDEO_URL"

Both produce a

.vtt

file.

If neither works, inform the user that video này không có phụ đề.

Step 4: Convert VTT to plain text

Use the bundled conversion script to deduplicate and clean the VTT output:

bash

VIDEO_TITLE=$(yt-dlp --print "%(title)s" "$VIDEO_URL" | tr '/' '_' | tr ':' '-' | tr '?' '' | tr '"' '')
VTT_FILE=$(ls transcript_temp*.vtt 2>/dev/null | head -n 1)

python3 skills/youtube-transcript/scripts/vtt-to-txt.py "$VTT_FILE" "${VIDEO_TITLE}.txt"

Then clean up the temporary VTT file:

bash

rm "$VTT_FILE"

Step 5: Confirm to user

Tell the user the file name and location. Offer to read/display the content if they want to review it.

Why deduplication matters

YouTube auto-generated VTT files show captions progressively with overlapping timestamps, producing many duplicate lines. The conversion script uses a seen-set to preserve speaking order while removing duplicates.

Language selection

By default yt-dlp downloads all available subtitle languages. To target a specific language:

bash

yt-dlp --write-auto-sub --sub-langs vi --skip-download --output "transcript_temp" "$VIDEO_URL"

Common codes:

en

(English),

vi

(Vietnamese),

ja

(Japanese),

ko

(Korean).

Error handling

Read

references/error-handling.md

for solutions to common issues (private videos, geo-blocking, SSL errors, missing subtitles).

youtube-transcript

NPX Install

Tags

SKILL.md Content

YouTube Transcript Downloader

Workflow

Step 1: Verify yt-dlp

Step 2: Get video info and check subtitles

Step 3: Download subtitles

Step 4: Convert VTT to plain text

Step 5: Confirm to user

Why deduplication matters

Language selection

Error handling