Summarize YouTube
Overview
Produce best-quality summaries from YouTube videos by transcribing audio with yt-dlp + whisper.cpp and summarizing with Claude CLI. This avoids caption-track errors and keeps the workflow reproducible.
Quick Start
- •Run the script with the video URL:
scripts/summarize_youtube.sh "<youtube-url>" - •The summary is printed to stdout. Redirect to a file if needed:
scripts/summarize_youtube.sh "<url>" > /tmp/summary.md
Workflow
- •Confirm a whisper.cpp GGML model exists at:
~/.cache/whisper.cpp/ggml-medium.en.bin - •If missing, download it with:
nix shell nixpkgs#whisper-cpp --command whisper-cpp-download-ggml-model medium.en --output-dir ~/.cache/whisper.cpp - •Run
scripts/summarize_youtube.shto transcribe via yt-dlp + whisper.cpp and summarize with Claude.
Options
- •
--cli <provider>: claude (default), codex, gemini - •
--length <preset>: short|medium|long|xl|xxl (default: xxl) - •
--model <id>: whisper.cpp model id (default: medium.en) - •
--timeout <duration>and--retries <count>: pass through to summarize - •
--extract: transcript only (no LLM summary)
Script
scripts/summarize_youtube.sh is the canonical entry point. Prefer it over hand-crafted commands so the workflow stays consistent.