Tldw

What This Skill Does

The Tldw (Too Long; Didn't Watch) skill by vovavvk is a powerful utility for OpenClaw that automates the process of extracting, cleaning, and summarizing YouTube video transcripts. By leveraging the industry-standard yt-dlp tool, it pulls caption data directly from video URLs, strips away repetitive artifacts common in machine-generated subtitles, and produces a structured, human-readable summary. This skill is designed to save users significant time by condensing lengthy educational videos, news reports, or documentaries into actionable insights, key arguments, and final conclusions.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your OpenClaw environment, execute the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/vovavvk/tldw

This command automatically provisions a local virtual environment in the venv/ directory, installs the necessary dependencies including yt-dlp, and configures the cache to ensure future requests for the same video are processed instantly. Ensure your system meets the Python 3.8+ requirement before attempting installation.

Use Cases

This skill is highly effective for professionals, students, and researchers who consume high volumes of video content. Use it to:

• Rapidly review long-form instructional content without scrubbing through timelines.
• Create summaries of news clips to extract specific data points or quotes for reports.
• Stay informed on technical topics by summarizing complex conference talks or tutorials.
• Bypass the time-consuming process of manual note-taking during video playback.

Example Prompts

1. "Summarize this video for me: [YouTube URL]. Focus specifically on the key arguments and the final verdict."
2. "Can you give me a bulleted list of the main takeaways from this lecture video: [YouTube URL]?"
3. "I don't have time to watch this full documentary. Please provide a 500-word summary of the most important concepts discussed in [YouTube URL]."

Tips & Limitations

For optimal results, ensure the target video has closed captions (CC) enabled, as the skill relies on these for text extraction. If you need to access age-restricted or members-only content, ensure you place a valid Netscape-formatted cookie file in the skill directory and use the --cookies flag. Be aware that heavily experimental or abstract videos without clear transcripts may result in lower-quality summaries. Caching is enabled by default to save bandwidth, so frequent requests for the same URL will be near-instantaneous.