YouTube Transcriber

One-command transcription for any YouTube video — even when subtitles are disabled.

How it works:

1. Tries to fetch existing YouTube subtitles first (free, instant)
2. If subtitles are disabled/unavailable → downloads audio → transcribes via OpenAI Whisper API

Prerequisites

• yt-dlp — brew install yt-dlp or pip install yt-dlp
• ffmpeg — brew install ffmpeg
• OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable set

Usage

# Basic — auto-detect best method
{baseDir}/scripts/transcribe.sh "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID"