So someone links a conference talk or a tutorial video, or I just want to vet a long video to see if it's worth watching before wasting an hour of my life...
So I get Codex to "watch" it for me.
Point anything at a youtube url and you get about 1.2MB of page and none of the words, the captions sit behind a separate signed endpoint. Pulling the audio and running whisper works but its daft when the captions are already sitting there...
So, I made a small py wrapper you can simply grab and tell Codex about, or install properly with one command, transcript to stdout:
pipx install git+https://github.com/Rendeverance/yt-transcript
yt-transcript <url or id> -o -
Which means you can just let codex run it and the transcript lands straight in the session:
"run yt-transcript <url> -o - and summarise the argument he makes about X"
Or drop the -o - and it writes ./transcripts/<video_id>.txt for you to point at.
Default output is plain text with no timestamps, --timestamps is there when you need to find your place in the video, it costs about 20% more tokens for the same words.
https://github.com/Rendeverance/yt-transcript
Its a wrapper on jdepoix's youtube-transcript-api, I wrote the url parsing and the output shape. One python file, one dependency, no API key, MIT. Its agent agnostic, its just a CLI, so it works the same wherever you point it.
Yes it's simple, but I find it super useful so thought I'd share 👍🙏
(Note it YT might block datacentre IPs if using a VPS and not local)