Fetch and read transcripts from YouTube videos. Use when you need to summarize a video, answer questions about its content, or extract information from it.
Security Analysis
high confidenceThe skill does what it says — it uses yt-dlp to fetch YouTube subtitles and converts them to plain text; its requirements and behavior are consistent with its description.
The skill's stated purpose is fetching and reading YouTube transcripts. It only requires the yt-dlp binary (and the provided script invokes yt-dlp) which is appropriate and expected.
SKILL.md instructs running the included Python script which runs yt-dlp in a temporary directory to fetch subtitles and prints cleaned text to stdout. The script only reads the temporary subtitle files it created and does not access other files, environment variables, or external endpoints beyond what yt-dlp uses (YouTube).
Install spec in the registry lists a brew formula for yt-dlp (reasonable). SKILL.md metadata also references a pip install option — a minor inconsistency but not malicious. Both brew and pip are common install methods for yt-dlp; there is no download-from-random-URL or arbitrary archive extraction.
No environment variables, credentials, or config paths are requested. The script runs a subprocess and uses a temporary directory only — no secret access or unrelated credentials are required.
The skill is not always-enabled and does not request elevated or persistent privileges or modify other skills. It can be invoked by the agent (default), which is expected for a user-invocable skill.
Guidance
This skill appears coherent and limited to fetching YouTube subtitles using yt-dlp and converting them to plain text. Before installing: ensure you trust the source of yt-dlp (install via your package manager: brew or pip) since yt-dlp will make network requests to YouTube; the script prints transcript text to stdout (which your agent may send to the model), so avoid using it on videos containing sensitive/private information if you do not want that content sent to external services. Note the small metadata mismatch: registry lists brew install while SKILL.md mentions a pip option — that's benign but worth checking which install method you will use.
Latest Release
v1.0.0
Initial release of youtube-watcher. - Fetch and read transcripts from YouTube videos. - Summarize videos, answer questions, or extract specific information from transcripts. - Trigger phrases include: "watch youtube", "summarize video", "video transcript", "youtube summary", and "analyze video". - Requires installation of `yt-dlp` for transcript retrieval. - Only works with videos that have closed captions or auto-generated subtitles.
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Published by @Michaelgathara on ClawHub
