YouTube Transcript (Captions-Only)

This skill extracts transcripts from existing YouTube captions.

Primary behavior

• Prefer manual subtitles when available.
• Fall back to auto-generated captions.
• Output either:
  • JSON segments (default) or
  • plain text (--text)
• Cache results locally in SQLite for speed.

Reliability behavior

• If YouTube blocks anonymous access (bot-check), provide cookies.txt.
• If yt-dlp reports no captions for a video, the script tries a fallback:
  1. YouTube’s transcript panel (youtubei get_transcript) when accessible

This published version intentionally does not call third-party transcript providers.