shillem/yt-dlp

1. Treat the first word passed by the user as $ACTION, remainder as $URL.
2. If $ACTION matches one of the actions, follow the action's instructions.
3. If $ACTION is empty or does not match an action, list the available actions.

Important: downloads are saved to <cwd>/.ai/yt-dlp (current working directory) unless the user specifies another path.

Available Scripts

• scripts/strip-transcript.mjs — Transcript utility

Actions

Video

Download a video at the best available quality.

yt-dlp --restrict-filenames -P <yt-dlp-download-folder> -o "%(title)s.%(ext)s" <url>

Common variants:

• Specific resolution cap (best ≤ 1080p, merged into mp4):

  yt-dlp --restrict-filenames -P <yt-dlp-download-folder> -o "%(title)s.%(ext)s" \
    -f "bv*[height<=1080]+ba/b[height<=1080]" --merge-output-format mp4 <url>
  

• A specific format from the format list — first inspect with yt-dlp -F <url>, then pick by id: yt-dlp -f 137+140 <url>
• Whole playlist: pass the playlist URL as-is. To limit, add --playlist-items 1-5
• Resume / skip already-downloaded: --continue --no-overwrites (default behavior is fine for most cases)

Audio

Extract audio only — strips the video stream.

yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 0 --restrict-filenames -P <yt-dlp-download-folder> -o "%(title)s.%(ext)s" <url>

• --audio-format accepts mp3, m4a, opus, flac, wav, aac, vorbis
• --audio-quality 0 means best VBR; use 192K for a fixed bitrate
• Embed cover art and metadata: add --embed-thumbnail --add-metadata
• For a playlist as an album, add -o "%(playlist_title)s/%(playlist_index)02d - %(title)s.%(ext)s"

Transcript

Download subtitles for a video and produce a clean plain-text transcript. Default to English unless the user specifies a language.

1. Download subs directly into <yt-dlp-download-folder> with --restrict-filenames so the sub file has a safe basename we can reuse for the transcript:

   yt-dlp --skip-download --write-subs --write-auto-subs --sub-langs "en" --sub-format "vtt/srt/best" --restrict-filenames -P <yt-dlp-download-folder> -o "%(title)s.%(ext)s" <url>
   

   • Prefer a single language code (en) over wildcards (en.*) — YouTube exposes en, en-en, and en-orig auto-caption tracks and a wildcard downloads all three
   • To inspect what's available first: yt-dlp --list-subs <url>
   • For multiple languages: --sub-langs "en,it,fr"
   • To convert VTT → SRT for editing tools: add --convert-subs srt

2. Find the sub and run the stripper with --in-place. The script writes the transcript alongside the source (stripping a trailing BCP-47 language tag like .en, .pt-BR, .zh-Hant from the filename), deletes the subtitle, and prints the new path. Use find rather than a glob — zsh errors on unmatched patterns (e.g. no .srt present):

   SUB=$(find <yt-dlp-download-folder> -maxdepth 1 \( -name '*.vtt' -o -name '*.srt' \) | head -n1)
   OUT=$(node scripts/strip-transcript.mjs --in-place "$SUB")
   

   The script auto-detects VTT vs SRT, removes cue numbers, timestamp lines, inline timing tags (<00:00:01.000>), and dedupes the rolling lines that YouTube auto-captions emit. When reading from stdin it defaults to VTT; for SRT from stdin pass --format srt.

   If the user explicitly asked for the raw subtitle file (e.g. for a video editor), drop --in-place and redirect stdout to a .txt yourself so the .vtt/.srt is preserved.

3. Show the user the path in $OUT and offer to summarize the transcript.

Tips & Gotchas

• Non-YouTube sites: yt-dlp supports 1000+ sites (Vimeo, Twitch, SoundCloud, Twitter/X, TikTok, etc.). The commands above generally work as-is — pass the URL. Site-specific quirks (DRM, private URLs) are documented at https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/master/supportedsites.md.
• Age-gated / region-locked videos: pass --cookies-from-browser <browser> (e.g. safari, chrome, firefox) to use the user's logged-in session
• Rate limits / 429s: add --sleep-requests 1 --sleep-interval 5 --max-sleep-interval 15
• Don't shell-interpolate untrusted URLs — always quote "<url>" to avoid & query-string surprises