| name | ingest-youtube |
| description | Pull a YouTube video transcript into a queryable markdown vault with yt-dlp subtitle discovery, VTT cleanup, metadata frontmatter, and capture-seed stubs. |
| risk | safe |
| source | community |
| source_repo | adelaidasofia/ai-brain-starter |
| source_type | community |
| date_added | 2026-05-09 |
| license | MIT |
| license_source | https://github.com/adelaidasofia/ai-brain-starter/blob/main/LICENSE |
| upstream | https://github.com/adelaidasofia/ai-brain-starter/tree/main/skills/ingest-youtube |
| plugin | {"setup":{"type":"manual","summary":"Install yt-dlp locally before running ingest.py; the script only accepts http(s) YouTube video URLs and writes markdown into the selected vault.","docs":"SKILL.md"}} |
ingest-youtube — YouTube-to-vault connector
Pulls YouTube transcripts into a markdown vault as queryable typed-memory entries that downstream skills (knowledge graph extraction, voice-fingerprint training, content repurposing, action-item extraction) can act on.
Same pattern as ingest-slack, ingest-whatsapp, ingest-notion, ingest-linear, ingest-github, ingest-gmail. Adding YouTube means a new normalizer, not a new architecture.
When to use
- User pastes a YouTube URL and asks for a transcript or summary
- User says
/ingest-youtube <url> for a single video
- User asks to capture, sync, ingest, transcribe, or pull a talk/podcast/keynote into the vault
Do NOT use for:
- Downloading the actual video file (use
yt-dlp directly with -f best)
- Channel-wide ingestion or
--days windows; this script ingests one video URL at a time
- Live streams (transcripts are not stable)
- Non-YouTube sources (Vimeo, Twitch, Twitter Spaces have their own connectors)
- One-off transcript reads where the user does not want a vault file (run
yt-dlp --write-auto-sub directly and pipe to stdout)
How it works
- Parse the input as one YouTube video URL.
- Verify
yt-dlp is installed. If not, the script exits with install instructions: brew install yt-dlp (macOS) or pip3 install --user yt-dlp.
- Validate the URL as a single http(s) YouTube video and call
yt-dlp --ignore-config --list-subs -- <url> to enumerate available subtitles.
- Subtitle priority: manual subs > auto-generated captions. Manual subs preserve creator-provided punctuation and speaker labels; auto-gen is uppercase + no punctuation.
- Download the highest-priority subtitle as VTT via
yt-dlp --write-sub --sub-lang <lang> --skip-download. Default language preference: en,es (English first, Spanish second).
- Strip VTT timing markers and merge into clean prose paragraphs. Deduplicate repeated lines (auto-generated VTTs are line-doubled). Preserve speaker labels if the source had them.
- Pull video metadata (title, channel, upload date, duration, video_id, URL) via
yt-dlp --print-json --skip-download.
- Slugify the channel name and video title. Write to
External Inputs/YouTube/<channel-slug>/<YYYY-MM-DD>-<video-slug>.md.
- Scan transcript for trigger keywords (decision, framework, model, principle, "the lesson is", playbook, anti-pattern, case study). For each match, create a writing-seed stub at so the seed lands in the captures aggregator.
