Does this skill handle the duplicate lines in auto-generated captions?

Yes, it includes a specialized Python post-processing script that deduplicates overlapping lines to ensure the final text file is readable.

Can I save the transcript as a plain text file?

Yes, while the skill downloads VTT files initially, its standard workflow converts them into sanitized .txt files using the video title as the filename.

Do I need to install external tools to use this?

The skill uses yt-dlp and Whisper. It will automatically check for these tools and provide guided installation commands if they are missing.

What happens if a video has no subtitles or captions?

The skill can download the audio track and use OpenAI Whisper to generate a full transcription locally on your machine after requesting your confirmation.

YouTube Transcript Downloader

Name: YouTube Transcript Downloader
Author: xiaoqiuaming

byxiaoqiuaming

0•

Web Scraping & Data Collection

Extracts and cleans transcripts, subtitles, and captions from YouTube videos using yt-dlp and OpenAI Whisper for AI-powered transcription.

The YouTube Transcript Downloader skill provides a robust, multi-tier workflow for retrieving text content from any YouTube video. It intelligently prioritizes high-quality manual subtitles and auto-generated captions before falling back to local AI transcription via OpenAI Whisper if no native subtitles exist. Beyond simple downloading, the skill automates the tedious process of deduplicating overlapping lines common in YouTube's VTT format, providing users with clean, readable plain text files optimized for research, content repurposing, and LLM analysis.

Key Features

01Automated environment checks and installation for yt-dlp and Whisper

02Pre-transcription file size estimation and user confirmation prompts for resource management

03Automatic deduplication and cleaning of VTT files into formatted plain text

040 GitHub stars

05Multi-tier retrieval prioritizing manual subtitles over auto-generated captions

06Fallback AI transcription using OpenAI Whisper when no subtitles are available

Use Cases

01Generating clean text versions of video tutorials for documentation or study guides

02Repurposing video content into blog posts or searchable knowledge bases

03Extracting dialogue from videos with disabled captions using local machine learning models

What are Skills?·How to Install

Install with 🐟 Skill.Fish

npx skillfish add xiaoqiuaming/tenant_backup youtube-transcript

For use in Claude.ai and ChatGPT

Download Skill