Yt-transcriber – Give a YouTube URL and get a transcription

https://github.com/pmarreck/yt-transcriber

132•Bluestein•6h ago

Comments

cmaury•5h ago

Thanks for sharing. This is exactly the type of utility that vibecoding is for. It takes 5 secons to ask GPT to write a scripr to do this tailored to your specific use case. It's way faster than trying to get someone elses repo up and running.

Bluestein•5h ago

Sure thing ...

And, yes, indeed, AI-coding is order-of-magnitude having an effect along the lines that "low-code" was treading ...

... also, for less-capable coders or "borderline" coders the effort/benefit equation has radically shifted.-

sannysanoff•4h ago

Selfware.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTCoding/comments/1lusr07/self...

Gonna be lots of posts of selfware like that soon.

Bluestein•4h ago

I think you either coined (kudos) or spotted the true "term du jour" here.-

sannysanoff•4h ago

people don't even get it :-]

cmaury•2h ago

I like it, though I'm sure we'll end up being stuck with "vibe ware"

mikeve•5h ago

Interesting project! I've been working on a project in this space myself (WaveMemo)

I must say, speaker diarization is surprisingly tricky to do. The most common approach seems to be to use pyannote, but the quality is not amazing...

ethan_smith•4h ago

For better diarization quality than pyannote, check out Whisper-DiarizationX which combines Whisper with ECAPA-TDNN speaker embeddings and spectral clustering.

paulirish•5h ago

Can also just fetch the subs already in YouTube rather than retranscribing. eg:

yt-dlp --write-auto-subs --skip-download "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xTGNNLPyMI"

toomuchtodo•5h ago

It's a good call out. I leverage yt-dlp as a library for downstream tooling (archival of media to long term storage repositories), and always recommend folks rely on yt-dlp whenever possible due to the ecosystem of folks grinding to keep their extractors current. Their maintainers are both helpful and responsive.

(with that said, I do not want to diminish OP's work in any way; great job! "What I cannot build, I do not understand" - Feynman)

paulirish•5h ago

Same, yup. OP is indeed already using yt-dlp for the video download. (Then Whisper for transcribing, Ollama/lmstudio/OpenAI for summarizing)

hiAndrewQuinn•2h ago

Minus the summarization, that is the same pipeline I use in [1] for generating listening practice Anki flashcards for foreign language students. It surprised me that nobody had really built out a program I could find around yt-dlp and Whisper for this kind of use case even a few years after it came out.

[1]: https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/audio2anki

Jerry2•5h ago

Yep. You can also automatically save them if you use mpv to watch YT: https://github.com/nick-s-b/mpv-transcript discovered this script yesterday.

adamgordonbell•5h ago

Recently, I was working on a similar project and I found that grabbing the transcripts quickly leads to your IP being blocked for the transcripts.

I ended up doing the same as this person, downloading the MP4s and then transcribing myself. I was assuming it was some sort of anti LLM scraper feature they put in place.

Has anyone used this --write-auto-subs flag and not been flagged after doing 20 or so videos?

hamiecod•2h ago

—-write-auto-subs gets your IP banned for 12/24 hours if you download video subtitles in bulk but if the subtitles are downloaded with sufficient time gap in between, the ban is not triggered.

My startup has to utilize youtube transcriptions so we just subscribe to a youtube transcriptor api hosted on rapidapi that downloads subtitles. 1$ per 1000 reqs. Pretty cheap

MysticOracle•58m ago

Yep, this happened to me & got IP banned for a day.

mckirk•4h ago

I've found the YT transcripts to be severely lacking sometimes, in accuracy and features. Especially speaker identification is really useful if you want to e.g. summarize podcasts or interviews, so if this project here delivers on that then it's definitely better than the YT transcripts.

stanleykm•4h ago

I’ve had some success with running them through another LLM to have it clean up the transcription errors based on the context. But this obviously does nothing for speaker identitication.

paulirish•4h ago

An approach I've been using recently is to rely on pyannote/tinydiarize only for the speaker_turn timestamps, but prefer the larger model (or in this case YT's autotranscript) for the actual text.

rpastuszak•4h ago

IIRC YT also has a "private" API you can call directly (or via an npm package: youtube-transcribe).

(I'm using it in https://butter.sonnet.io)

0points•5h ago

Youtube already offers AI transcriptions on their site. As another commenter points out, you grab them with yt-dlp.

And unlike how your tool will be supported in the future, thousands of users make sure yt-dlp keeps working as google keep changing the site (currently 1459 contributors).

passivegains•4h ago

the volunteer open source effort behind youtube-dl and its forks/descendants are so impressive in large part because of how many features they provide and thus have to maintain: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp#usage-and-options this tool won't provide the list of available thumbnails or settings for HTTP buffer size, but I think that's a pretty reasonable tradeoff.

swyx•4h ago

if you used this in earnest sufficiently, you'd know yt default transcripts are not good enough because youtube often (ok say 5% of time) fails to transcribe videos particularly livestreams and shortly after release.

youtube also blocks transcript exports for some things like https://youtubetranscript.com/

retranscribing is necessary and important part of the creator toolset.

isubkhankulov•4h ago

I’ve been using this free tool. It gives quality diarized transcripts https://contentflow.megalabs.co

Leftium•3h ago

Two similar Show HN projects:

- This python one is more amenable to modding into your own custom tool: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/44353447

- Another bash script: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/41473379

---

They all seem to be built on top of:

- yt-dlp to download video

- whisper for transcription

- ffmpeg for audio/video extraction/processing

eigenvalue•3h ago

I made a tool like this a while ago which was useful for transcribing a whole playlist automatically using whisper:

https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/bulk_transcribe_youtube...

I ended up turning a beefed up version of it which makes polished written documents from the raw transcript, you can try it at

https://youtubetranscriptoptimizer.com/

totallynotryan•2h ago

Hey all, I built a 100% free (no-signup) youtube summarizer: "https://youtube-summarizer-lime.vercel.app/". Accurate summaries in under 8 seconds.

93po•2h ago

bookmarked, thanks, the top google search results always require sign-up. frustrating state of the internet

dudeWithAMood•39m ago

How did you get around youtube blocking cloud IP ranges? Are you suing residential proxies?

lpeancovschi•2h ago

Youtube's T&C don't allow downloading youtube audio/video. How do other services get away with it?

MysticOracle•57m ago

I think they use rotating IP/Proxy services

lpeancovschi•9m ago

Might be, but I think google would still be able to chase them down.

nadermx•45m ago

"The court held that merely clicking on a download button does not show consent with license terms, if those terms were not conspicuous and if it was not explicit to the consumer that clicking meant agreeing to the license."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specht_v._Netscape_Communica...

lpeancovschi•10m ago

I'm not a lawyer but I think even if you offset the legal responsibilities to the user by alerting them with copyrights prompt it's still illegal to download youtube videos.

manishsharan•1h ago

Will this make Google mad at me and cancel/freeze all my Google services ?

labrador•1h ago

Many channels I follow, such as Vlad Vexler, have taken measures so you can't download the transcript with yt-dlp. Furthermore, they don't provide a transcipt option on their videos. I assume this is to prevent people from just reading AI summaries, which is annoying in Vexler's case because he talks slowly and meanders around. If I really want to hear his point but don't want to listen to that then I download the video with yt-dlp and use Whisper to transcribe it.

Bluestein•11m ago

... the ... slower ... the guy the ... less ... content ... and ... more ... advertising.-

arkaic•1h ago

On this note, is Ytube also the best transcriber of foreign languages or is there something better?

MysticOracle•43m ago

For (English only) speech-to-text, NVIDIA's Parakeet-V2 is significantly faster than Whisper and I found it to be more accurate.

https://huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2

For Apple Silicon (MLX) https://huggingface.co/senstella/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2-mlx

driscoll42•15m ago

Compared to all Whister models? Or the faster ones? And which version of Whisper? All for a faster, more accurate model, but need a bit more.

ipsum2•8m ago

All of them, in my experience.

driscoll42•7m ago

Fair, looking at the ASR leaderboards it is truly better - https://huggingface.co/spaces/hf-audio/open_asr_leaderboard and NVIDIA's Canary might be even better? Will try these out. Appreciate bringing these to my attention!

dudeWithAMood•37m ago

I did something similar piping the output of the youtube-transcript-api python package to openAI's api: https://github.com/DavidZirinsky/tl-dw/

Show HN: Zero-back-end process mining tool running Python in WASM

Fixed point thm in metric spaces and its application to the Collatz conjecture

Unsafe and Unpredictable: My Volvo EX90 Experience

Building Fast UPDATEs for ClickHouse

"Zero Trust Is Dead": Tailscale's Survey on Secure Networks

Raku: First Programming Language?

Disconnecting phone from internet creates mood boost on par with antidepressants

Space-Based Missile Interceptors for Golden Dome Being Tested by Northrop

Scientists Are Planning for Life After Finding Aliens

I built an AI plant identifier app

iOS 26 beta 4 adds more 'liquid' back to Liquid Glass design

The Twelve-Factor App

Show HN: Port – an open source, identifier-less, E2EE messaging app

RIP Ozzy

Quarterly Publication of Individuals Who Have Chosen to Expatriate [pdf]

Musk Allies to Raise Up to $12B for XAI Chips

Approximate First Principal Component

Wild Vanilla and pollinators at risk of spatial mismatch in a changing climate

Video Taken by Migrant Shows Overcrowded ICE Holding Cell in Manhattan

Designing a Composable Rate Limiter

UK border officials to use AI to verify ages of child asylum seekers

Reading QR codes without a computer

Brave blocks Microsoft Recall by default

NASA, Oxford Discover Warmer Uranus Than Once Thought Science

Heavyweight: An Art Project About Lawyer Vibes

Ozzy-osbourne–dies-aged-76

The Metamorphosis of Shaun Maguire, a Prominent Sequoia VC

A Type House Divided (2014)

Day War, Part II: Iran's Missile Force Performance

Ozzy Osbourne Has Died