video-transcribe

name

video-transcribe

description

Transcribe and summarize a video or podcast from a URL (YouTube, TikTok, Bilibili, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, 30+ platforms) or from a local media/.txt file. Use when the user shares a video/podcast link or media file and wants a transcript, summary, translation, or the original video downloaded. Triggers on "transcribe", "summarize this video", "what does this video say", "get the transcript", "转录", "视频摘要".

Video Transcribe

Runs this repo's pipeline headlessly: platform subtitles when available (seconds), local Whisper as fallback, then optimize → translate → summarize.

Before running

The command needs the project's virtualenv and ffmpeg. Verify once per session:

ls venv/bin/python && command -v ffmpeg

• No venv → ./install.sh (or python3 -m venv venv && venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt)
• No ffmpeg → brew install ffmpeg (macOS) / sudo apt install ffmpeg (Debian/Ubuntu). Do not proceed without it; audio extraction will fail.

Run it

venv/bin/python transcribe.py "<URL or file path>" --json

Always pass --json — it puts machine-readable output on stdout and keeps progress chatter on stderr. Parse the JSON rather than scraping the log lines.

Useful flags:

Flag	When to use
-l, --summary-language <code>	Summary language: en, zh, es, fr, de, it, pt, ru, ja, ko, ar. Default en
--no-llm	No API key available, or the user only wants the raw transcript. Skips optimize/translate/summarize
--no-video	User doesn't want the source video kept (faster, less disk)
--whisper-model small	Accuracy matters more than speed. tiny→large, default base
-o <dir>	Write the Markdown somewhere other than ./temp

The LLM steps need an OpenAI-compatible key via OPENAI_API_KEY (and optionally OPENAI_BASE_URL). Without one the pipeline still transcribes but falls back to basic formatting — prefer --no-llm in that case and summarize the transcript yourself, which is usually better anyway since you have the full context.

Provider settings:

export OPENAI_API_KEY="your_api_key_here"
export OPENAI_BASE_URL="https://openrouter.ai/api/v1"
export OPENAI_TRANSLATION_MODEL="gpt-4o"  # optional

For a one-off run, transcribe.py also accepts --api-key, --base-url, and --model. Prefer environment variables when possible so API keys are not written to shell history.

Reading the result

{
  "title": "...",
  "no_speech": false,
  "detected_language": "en",
  "files": { "raw": "...", "transcript": "...", "summary": "...", "translation": "..." },
  "media": { "path": "...", "kind": "video", "size_bytes": 2243691 }
}

Read the transcript / summary paths to get the content. translation is present only when the source language differs from the summary language.

Critical: no_speech

When "no_speech": true the source contains no speech at all. There is no transcript, no summary, no translation — the pipeline deliberately skips the LLM so that nothing gets invented.

If you see this, tell the user the video has no speech. Do not guess at the content, infer it from the title, or describe what the video "probably" says. This guard exists because feeding an empty transcript to an LLM previously produced a confident, entirely fabricated conversation.

Failure modes

• Exit 2 — bad input (missing file, unsupported extension, empty text file). The message says which; fix the argument.
• Exit 1 — download/transcode failure. Usually an unreachable URL, a region-blocked or private video, or missing ffmpeg. Report the actual error; don't retry blindly.
• First run downloads Whisper weights (~150 MB for base), so it can look stalled for a minute.
• Long videos are slow in Whisper mode (a 30-min audio-only podcast can take 15–60 min). Warn the user before starting; subtitle mode is seconds.