Transcribing YouTube Videos

Generate clean, deduplicated Markdown transcripts from YouTube videos using yt-dlp.

Prerequisites

Verify CLI dependencies before running:

command -v yt-dlp jq awk sed find

Required: yt-dlp, jq, awk, sed, find (standard POSIX utilities).

Workflow

Step 1: Get the video identifier

Accept any of these input formats:

• Full URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6pbQ5li5Cg
• Short URL: https://youtu.be/q6pbQ5li5Cg
• Shorts URL: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/q6pbQ5li5Cg
• Bare video ID: q6pbQ5li5Cg

Step 2: Run the script

bash {baseDir}/scripts/genInfoNugget.sh <URL_or_VIDEO_ID>

To reprocess an existing SRT without re-downloading:

bash {baseDir}/scripts/genInfoNugget.sh --fix <URL_or_VIDEO_ID>

Step 3: Verify output

The script produces two files in the current directory:

File	Contents
*.InfoNug.DDMMMYY.HHMMSS.md	Timestamped transcript with #### chapter headings
*.InfoNug.DDMMMYY.HHMMSS.md_chapters.md	Prose-only version grouped by chapter (no timestamps)

After the script completes, read the first ~30 lines of the prose file (_chapters.md) to confirm no triplication. Each phrase should appear exactly once.

Step 4: Present results

Report the two output filenames to the user. If the user wants a summary, read the prose file and summarize by chapter.

How the script works

1. Download: Tries manual subs first (--write-subs), falls back to auto-generated (--write-auto-subs) only if needed
2. Deduplicate: AWK pass removes ≤100ms transition blocks and strips rolling duplicate lines carried forward from previous blocks
3. Chapters: Extracts chapter timestamps from info.json via jq, inserts #### headings in a single AWK pass
4. Prose: Strips all timestamps and joins text into flowing paragraphs grouped by chapter

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause	Fix
"No SRT file found"	No subtitles in target language	Check video has captions enabled
Tripled text in output	Using old v1 script	Use this skill's script which includes deduplication
--fix fails with no SRT	Previous run cleaned up intermediate files	Run without --fix to re-download

Why does tripling happen? See references/faqs.md for a detailed explanation of YouTube's rolling VTT format and how the dedup works.