youtube-transcript

What This Skill Does

The YouTube Transcript skill is a robust tool designed to extract, parse, and summarize the textual content of any YouTube video. By leveraging a residential IP proxy mechanism, this skill bypasses common YouTube security measures that frequently block cloud-based IP addresses. It automates the retrieval of raw transcript data, providing users with both a comprehensive full-text document and a structured, timestamped transcript array. Whether you need to archive video content, create searchable documentation, or gain a quick overview of a long-form lecture or tutorial, this skill provides the infrastructure to ingest video content directly into your OpenClaw workflow.

Installation

To integrate this tool into your OpenClaw environment, execute the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/xthezealot/youtube-transcript. Before running the script, ensure you have reviewed the references/SETUP.md file in the source repository. This document details necessary Python dependency installations and the mandatory WireGuard VPN configuration required for cloud-hosted instances to maintain connectivity with YouTube's servers.

Use Cases

This skill is ideal for students and researchers who need to analyze long educational videos, content creators performing market research, and developers building archives of technical talks. It serves as a bridge between transient video content and permanent, queryable text data. Use it to quickly extract code snippets mentioned in tutorials or to create readable summaries of long-form interviews that might otherwise be difficult to scan.

Example Prompts

1. "Summarize the key takeaways from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"
2. "Extract the full transcript for video ID dQw4w9WgXcQ and save it as a text file for my notes."
3. "Transcribe the following YouTube video and highlight the sections where the author talks about AI safety: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"

Tips & Limitations

To ensure consistent performance, verify your VPN connection if you are running this on a cloud VPS, as YouTube will rate-limit or block standard data center IPs. The tool defaults to a specific language priority list (en, fr, de, es, it, pt, nl). If a video is in a different language, always provide the explicit language code as the second argument. Note that videos without generated captions or those with disabled community subtitles cannot be transcribed using this method.