YT Meta - YouTube Metadata Extractor

What This Skill Does

The YT Meta skill is a powerful command-line interface tool designed for OpenClaw users to extract rich metadata from YouTube without the need for an official API key. By leveraging advanced parsing techniques, it provides seamless access to video details, channel statistics, full playlist contents, search results, and comment sections. It is an essential asset for content researchers, data analysts, and developers who need to perform large-scale scraping or performance monitoring of YouTube content directly from their terminal or via the OpenClaw agent workflow.

Installation

To install this skill, run the following command in your terminal within the OpenClaw environment:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/lxgicstudios/yt-meta

Ensure you have Node.js installed on your system to support the underlying yt-meta-cli package, which is installed automatically during the deployment process.

Use Cases

This tool is versatile and suits a wide range of professional needs:

• Content Research: Quickly aggregate metadata from competitors, including video views, likes, and tag clusters to inform your own content strategy.
• Trend Analysis: Use the search command to scrape high-performing videos for specific keywords, sorting by view count to identify viral topics.
• Automated Reporting: Generate automated reports for channel performance by exporting channel video lists and statistics to JSON or CSV formats.
• Community Management: Extract and analyze comment sections for sentiment analysis, keyword identification, or managing engagement in large thread discussions.

Example Prompts

1. "Use yt-meta to fetch the top 50 most viewed videos for the search query 'machine learning' and save the results as a CSV file."
2. "Extract all comments from the video with ID dQw4w9WgXcQ and sort them by the top-rated comments, limited to 200 entries."
3. "Retrieve the channel stats and the last 100 videos uploaded by @mkbhd and provide the output in JSON format for further processing."

Tips & Limitations

• Rate Limiting: As this tool does not use an official API, excessive requests in a very short duration may trigger temporary rate limiting from YouTube. It is recommended to use the --limit flag judiciously for high-volume tasks.
• Data Integrity: Because this tool scrapes public data, changes to the YouTube layout may occasionally require updates to the underlying library.
• Output Formats: Always define your output format early using the -o flag (json, jsonl, csv, table) to ensure your data is ready for immediate integration with other analytical tools.