YouTube Digest
by @benheee
Understand, summarize, translate, and extract key points from YouTube videos. Use when a user provides a YouTube URL and wants: (1) a Chinese summary, (2) a...
clawhub install youtube-digestπ About This Skill
name: youtube-digest description: "Understand, summarize, translate, and extract key points from YouTube videos. Use when a user provides a YouTube URL and wants: (1) a Chinese summary, (2) a transcript or subtitle extraction, (3) translation of spoken content, (4) timestamps / chapter notes, (5) visual understanding via key frames, or (6) question answering about a video. Prefer this skill for transcript-first workflows."
YouTube Digest
Use a transcript-first workflow.
Quick workflow
1. Run scripts/fetch_youtube.py to collect metadata and subtitles.
If behind a proxy, add --proxy .
2. If subtitles exist, read summary.json and the generated transcript file first.
3. If the user only wants a quick answer, summarize directly from the transcript.
4. If the user needs stronger visual grounding, extract key frames with ffmpeg after downloading the video or by using an existing local video file.
5. If no subtitles are available, report that transcript extraction needs yt-dlp + a speech-to-text path (for example Whisper) before promising a result.
Default behavior
Outputs
For normal requests, return:
Files produced by the script
The fetch script writes an output directory containing:
summary.json β chosen subtitle file, title, uploader, duration, and extraction statustranscript.txt β plain text transcript when subtitles are availableyt-dlp (VTT/SRT)Read summary.json first to decide what to do next.
Required runtime tools
yt-dlp for metadata + subtitle extractiondeno as JS runtime (required by yt-dlp 2026+)ffmpeg for media conversion / optional frame extraction (optional)Key commands
Basic extraction:
python3 scripts/fetch_youtube.py "" --out /tmp/youtube-digest
With proxy:
python3 scripts/fetch_youtube.py "" --proxy http://your-proxy:port --out /tmp/youtube-digest
Prefer specific subtitle languages:
python3 scripts/fetch_youtube.py "" --langs zh.*,en.* --out /tmp/youtube-digest
Failure handling
yt-dlp is missing, stop and install it instead of improvising.References
references/install-and-deploy.md for deployment instructions.references/usage-patterns.md for output templates for summaries, translations, or Q&A.