- name
- youtube-transcript-fetcher
- description
- Fetch full YouTube transcripts with robust InnerTube fallback. Use when extracting captions/transcripts from a YouTube URL, channel, or batch config, especially when normal transcript tools fail, uploader subtitles are missing, or YouTube auto-generated captions may still be recoverable.
- metadata
- openclaw
- requires
- bins
- ["python3", "yt-dlp"]
- install
- kind
- apt
- package
- yt-dlp
- bins
- ["yt-dlp"]
- label
- Install yt-dlp (apt)
- kind
- brew
- formula
- yt-dlp
- bins
- ["yt-dlp"]
- label
- Install yt-dlp (brew)
Fetch transcripts from YouTube videos. Prefer this skill when the goal is to obtain source transcript text, not to summarize.
Run ./youtube-transcript-fetcher --url <youtube-url> for a single video. Run ./youtube-transcript-fetcher --channel <channel-id-or-handle> --hours <n> for recent channel videos. Run ./youtube-transcript-fetcher --config config/channels.example.json --daily for batch mode.
The main script is scripts/youtube_transcript_fetcher.py. It uses watch-page scraping plus InnerTube player API fallback with multiple client profiles (ANDROID, WEB, TVHTML5_SIMPLY_EMBEDDED_PLAYER, IOS) to recover caption tracks that simpler methods miss, including cases where only YouTube auto-generated captions are available.
Install Python dependencies with pip install -r requirements.txt before first use.
Return the transcript text from the generated JSON output. Do not rely on summary fields because this skill is intentionally transcript-first.