Video Transcript Downloader

A clean wrapper around yt-dlp that defaults to giving you transcripts as readable paragraphs instead of raw subtitle files. It tries YouTube's transcript API first, then falls back to subtitles when needed. You get timestamped output only when you ask for it, and bracketed noise like [Music] is stripped by default. Beyond transcripts, it handles the usual yt-dlp tasks: downloading video, audio, subtitles, listing formats, and passing through custom flags. The subcommands have focused help screens, which is nice when you're not sure what options exist. If you're building agents that need to read video content or just want a friendlier interface to yt-dlp's transcript capabilities, this saves you from writing the same cleanup logic every time.

skills.sh installs: 1.1K
GitHub stars: 7.5K
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add steipete/agent-scripts --skill video-transcript-downloader --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Video Transcript Downloader

./scripts/vtd.js can:

Print a transcript as a clean paragraph (timestamps optional).
Download video/audio/subtitles.

Transcript behavior:

YouTube: fetch via youtube-transcript-plus when possible.
Otherwise: pull subtitles via yt-dlp, then clean into a paragraph, including with --timestamps. Empty cleaned subtitles exit with an error and remove their temporary files.

Setup

cd ~/Projects/agent-scripts/skills/video-transcript-downloader && npm ci

CLI syntax:

./scripts/vtd.js --help
./scripts/vtd.js transcript --help

Subcommands support focused help without requiring --url.

Transcript (default: clean paragraph)

./scripts/vtd.js transcript --url 'https://…'
./scripts/vtd.js transcript --url 'https://…' --lang en
./scripts/vtd.js transcript --url 'https://…' --timestamps
./scripts/vtd.js transcript --url 'https://…' --keep-brackets

Download video / audio / subtitles

./scripts/vtd.js download --url 'https://…' --output-dir ~/Downloads
./scripts/vtd.js audio --url 'https://…' --output-dir ~/Downloads
./scripts/vtd.js subs --url 'https://…' --output-dir ~/Downloads --lang en

SKILL.md on GitHub