| name | media-ingest |
| description | Ingest media from a URL (YouTube + most sites) with `yt-dlp`/`ffmpeg` — transcript, audio, video, subtitles, formats. NOT for converting a local file to Markdown (use markdown-converter) or writing video scripts (use create). |
| when_to_use | download a youtube video, download/rip audio from a video, mp3/opus from youtube, get the transcript of a video, youtube transcript, extract subtitles, list video formats, download a playlist, save a podcast episode, yt-dlp |
| user-invocable | false |
Media Ingest
Pull media from a URL — YouTube and nearly every site yt-dlp supports. Tools: yt-dlp
(+ ffmpeg for merge/extract), both local CLIs; the fetch itself needs network.
- Transcript —
yt-dlp --write-auto-subs --sub-lang en --skip-download --sub-format vtt.
ALWAYS flatten the .vtt yourself: auto-caption VTT is ROLLING — each cue repeats the
tail of the previous one, so a naive concatenation duplicates most lines. Drop the
cue-timestamp lines and [Music]/[Applause] bracket cues, collapse consecutive
repeats, join to a paragraph. Emit timestamps ONLY when asked.
- Human-authored subs are cleaner than auto — ALWAYS try
--write-subs first, fall back
to --write-auto-subs only when none exist.
- Audio —
yt-dlp -x --audio-format opus (or mp3). Video — -F to list formats,
then -f <id> and --remux-video mp4 to repackage WITHOUT re-encoding.
- NEVER reach for a scraping library or the raw YouTube Data API —
yt-dlp is the
maintained path and already handles formats, playlists, and sign-in walls.
