| name | watch |
| description | Watch a video that Manifold has pre-staged. Manifold's main process downloads the video, extracts auto-scaled frames with ffmpeg, and produces a timestamped transcript (native captions or gpt-4o-transcribe). This skill receives the report path and tells Claude to read each frame. |
| argument-hint | <workdir-path-or-url> [question] |
| allowed-tools | Bash, Read |
| license | MIT |
| user-invocable | true |
/watch — Claude watches a Manifold-prepared video
The Manifold desktop app (this skill is bundled with it) does all the heavy
lifting in its main process. When the user clicks Run in the Watch panel,
Manifold:
- Downloads the video with
yt-dlp (or resolves the local path)
- Extracts auto-scaled JPEG frames with
ffmpeg
- Pulls native captions, or falls back to
gpt-4o-transcribe (OpenAI or Azure)
- Writes a
report.md plus frames/frame_*.jpg into a temp working directory
- Pastes
/watch:watch <workdir> into the active Claude Code agent
Your job in this skill is only to:
- Read the pre-staged
report.md (path is the first argument)
- Read each frame path the report lists
- Answer the user's question (if any) using frames + transcript
Step 1 — load the report
cat "$1/report.md"
If $1 does not look like a directory containing report.md, the user invoked
/watch:watch <url> directly without the Watch panel. In that case, respond:
Direct CLI invocation is not supported in this build. Open Manifold's Watch
panel, paste the URL, and click Run. Manifold will download the video and
hand the prepared frames back to me.
Step 2 — read every frame
The report lists frame paths under "## Frames" with t=MM:SS timestamps. Use
the Read tool on every frame path in a single message (parallel tool calls)
so you see them together. The transcript section gives you the spoken content
aligned to the same timeline.
Step 3 — answer
If the user asked a specific question (everything after the workdir path),
answer it directly, citing timestamps. If no question was asked, summarize the
video — structure, key moments, notable visuals, spoken content.
Cleanup
The report ends with a Work dir: ... line. Manifold owns the directory's
lifecycle; do not delete it yourself.
