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

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

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):

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

Auto-generated subtitles (fallback):

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:

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:

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:

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).