YouTube Transcript Fetcher

Fetches subtitle text from a YouTube video and outputs it as Markdown. The retrieved transcript can then be used for downstream tasks such as summarization, analysis, translation, or answering questions about the video.

Prerequisites

uv must be installed on the system (used for dependency resolution and script execution)
Network access to YouTube

Usage

uv run <skill-dir>/scripts/fetch_transcript.py "<YouTube URL>"

Output goes to stdout in Markdown format. Pipe or redirect as needed:

# Capture to a variable
TRANSCRIPT=$(uv run <skill-dir>/scripts/fetch_transcript.py "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXXXXXXXXXX")

# Save to a file
uv run <skill-dir>/scripts/fetch_transcript.py "https://youtu.be/XXXXXXXXXXX" > transcript.md

Supported URL formats

The script auto-extracts the video ID from any of these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXXXXXXXXXX
https://youtu.be/XXXXXXXXXXX
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XXXXXXXXXXX

Output format

# Video Title

- **Channel**: Channel Name
- **URL**: Original URL

## Transcript (language_code)

Full subtitle text joined with spaces as plain text.

Language priority

Transcript lookup follows this order:

English (en) or Japanese (ja) manual captions
If neither is found, the first available transcript track

Auto-generated captions are included. Videos with no captions at all will error.

Error cases

The script prints to stderr and exits non-zero on failure. Common causes:

Cannot extract video ID — unsupported or malformed URL
Metadata fetch failed — video is private, deleted, or network error
Transcript fetch failed — captions are disabled or none exist

When an error occurs, inform the user and suggest they check the video's visibility and caption settings.

Typical workflow

When a user shares a YouTube link and asks about its content:

Run the script to fetch the transcript
Read the output to understand the video content
Perform the requested task (summarize, analyze, answer questions, etc.)

youtube-transcript