yt-fetch

name	yt-fetch
description	Fetch a YouTube video as readable markdown (title, channel, description, clean transcript). WebFetch can't read YouTube — this wraps a tested yt-dlp pipeline.
argument-hint	<youtube-url> [output-dir]
allowed-tools	Bash, Read

yt-fetch — make a YouTube video readable

Reach for this whenever you need to read / study / summarize / quote a YouTube video and WebFetch returns nothing — YouTube blocks AI fetch. Produces a clean transcript + metadata as markdown.

WebFetch can't read YouTube. This runs a tested yt-dlp wrapper that pulls the video's captions + metadata (no video download) and cleans the auto-caption "rolling window" duplication into plain text.

Use

scripts/yt-fetch.sh <youtube-url> [output-dir]

It prints the path to a single <video-id>.md (default dir: cwd) holding title · channel · duration · url · description · clean transcript. Then Read that file to study/quote/summarize. Capture the path:

md=$(scripts/yt-fetch.sh "https://youtu.be/XXXX" /tmp)   # then Read "$md"

• No captions → the Transcript section says so (nothing to read — pick another source).
• Unavailable / private / blocked → exits non-zero with a message.
• Single video only (not playlists). English captions by default.

Why a wrapper, not a raw command (the traps it handles)

Verified against the yt-dlp docs — the naive one-liner fails in ways the script fixes:

• --sub-langs "en.*" is a regex that matches every English variant (en, en-orig, en-de-DE, en-ja…) → HTTP 429. The script uses a bounded exact list en-orig,en,en-US,en-GB.
• --print implies --simulate → it silently skips writing files. The script uses --write-info-json + jq.
• Auto-caption .vtt is full of rolling-window duplicate lines; scripts/vtt2text.py strips them to clean text (no ffmpeg).

To fetch non-English or more langs, edit --sub-langs in scripts/yt-fetch.sh. If this stays heavily used, that's the single place to harden it.