YouTube auto captions via yt-dlp

Use this skill to fetch auto-generated English captions from YouTube using yt-dlp.

Workflow

1. Accept a YouTube URL or video ID from the user.
2. Check if yt-dlp is available.
3. If missing, ask the user if they want help installing it and offer install commands.
4. Run the download command or the bundled script to write auto-subs in VTT and a readable transcript in TXT.

Preferred command

Use exactly this command when running manually:

yt-dlp \
  --skip-download \
  --write-auto-subs \
  --sub-lang en \
  --sub-format vtt \
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID

Bundled script

Use scripts/download_auto_captions.sh to handle URL or ID input and an optional output directory. It writes both .vtt and a cleaned .txt transcript (timestamps/tags stripped, common non-speech cues removed, merged into sentences):

bash scripts/download_auto_captions.sh <url-or-id> [output-dir]

Install guidance (ask first)

If yt-dlp is not installed, ask the user whether to install and then offer one of:

• macOS (Homebrew): brew install yt-dlp
• Python (pipx): pipx install yt-dlp
• Python (pip): python3 -m pip install -U yt-dlp

Notes

• Output files are written as .vtt subtitles and .txt transcripts in the chosen directory.
• Auto-subs depend on what YouTube provides; some videos may not have auto-generated captions.