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pmarreck
yt-transcriber
Shell2024–2025
pmarreck / yt-transcriber

yt-transcriber

CLI app- Give it a YouTube URL and you get a transcription with possible speaker identification and optional summary or translation, all thanks to open-source AI tooling and my lack of enough free time to watch content-sparse YouTube videos

Command LineAI & Machine Learning
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
3Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
337GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

CLI app- Give it a YouTube URL and you get a transcription with possible speaker identification and optional summary or translation, all thanks to open-source AI tooling and my lack of enough free time to watch content-sparse YouTube videos

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month4 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2024-11-15 15:03:47 UTC to 2025-07-22 21:28:36 UTC.

01232024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsNov 20242024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsMar 20252025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 commentsJul 2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Nov 20242024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Dec 20242024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20252025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20252025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20252025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20252025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20252025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20252025-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-08-01 00:00:00 UTC312

What Hacker News says

4 sources
toddmorey·Jul 22, 2025
Always fascinated to read CLAUDE.md files that are appearing in more and more open source projects: https://github.com/pmarreck/yt-transcriber/blob/yolo/CLAUDE.... I'd be really curious to see some sort of benchmark / evaluation of these context resources against the same coding tasks. Right now, the instructions all sound so prescriptive and authoritative, yet is really hard to evaluation their effectiveness.
In Yt-transcriber – Give a YouTube URL and get a transcription
pmarreck·Nov 15, 2024
I wrote a commandline app that takes a youtube URL (or path to any audio or video file that ffmpeg can read) and converts it into a transcript using the Whisper model and then optionally translates or summarizes it using OpenAI. It's been incredibly useful for chewing through my youtube backlog, but it might also be hugely useful for the deaf or hearing-impaired. It uses Nix to manage dependencies, although I got clever about making that not necessary (I don't like forcing Nix on people until they're ready for it) https://github.com/pmarreck/yt-transcriber This is mainly useful for single-speaker videos that are conveying information. Most other solutions out there that claim to do this only download the closed-captioning and summarize that, but MANY YouTubes do not have a good closed-captioning track, in which case my method still works.
Read the rest
(Note: Aiming for Linux/Mac compatibility but have only tested it on Mac so far) I next want to convert it into a simple web service and/or perhaps Docker image to democratize this out to everyone. (I don't know if I'd be able to afford to host since the CPU/GPU cost for running Whisper on spoken audio is not insignificant, but it should work fine on anyone's local machine assuming they have the hardware for it.) I also want to add speaker identification (something called "diarization"), possibly by going to WhisperX or other solutions out there, which would make this more useful for multi-party conversation audio. In other news, I'm looking for contract work (I'm just doing side projects like the above to keep myself busy and, ideally, useful). My last job was Director of Engineering for a startup, but due to having a toddler I wish to remain work-flexible for the time being. https://www.linkedin.com/in/petermarreck/
In The cochlear implant question

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