youtube-subtitle

name: youtube-subtitle description: Downloads the original-language subtitle from a YouTube video, converts it to plain text, and saves it with an auto-generated filename (YYYYMMDD-xxx-yyy). Use when given a YouTube URL and asked to download subtitles.

YouTube Subtitle Downloader

Purpose

Download the original-language subtitle of a YouTube video, convert it from VTT to plain text, and save it with a consistent filename.

Arguments

• url (required): YouTube video URL

Workflow

1. Get title: Run yt-dlp --print title [url]
2. Get date: Run date +%Y%m%d
3. Generate PREFIX: Compress the title to 2 English lowercase words → YYYYMMDD-xxx-yyy
4. Confirm with user: Show the proposed PREFIX and ask for approval before proceeding
5. Download subtitle: yt-dlp --write-auto-subs --sub-langs ".*-orig" --skip-download -o "PREFIX.%(ext)s" [url]
6. Convert to text: uv run skills/youtube-subtitle/scripts/vtt2txt.py PREFIX.<lang>-orig.vtt --url [url] --title [title]
   • <lang> is the language code detected in the downloaded filename (e.g. kn)
   • [title] is the title obtained in step 1

Notes

• The .*-orig pattern matches the original-language auto-caption (e.g. kn-orig for Kannada)
• VTT and TXT files are saved in the current directory