YouTube Transcript Fetcher

Fetch full YouTube transcripts with robust InnerTube fallback. Use when extracting captions/transcripts from a YouTube URL, channel, or batch config, especia...

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.