ingest-youtube — YouTube-to-vault connector

Pulls YouTube transcripts into a markdown vault as queryable typed-memory entries that downstream skills (knowledge graph extraction, voice-fingerprint training, content repurposing, action-item extraction) can act on.

Same pattern as ingest-slack, ingest-whatsapp, ingest-notion, ingest-linear, ingest-github, ingest-gmail. Adding YouTube means a new normalizer, not a new architecture.

When to use

User pastes a YouTube URL and asks for a transcript or summary
User says /ingest-youtube <url> for a single video
User asks to capture, sync, ingest, transcribe, or pull a talk/podcast/keynote into the vault

Do NOT use for:

Downloading the actual video file (use yt-dlp directly with -f best)
Channel-wide ingestion or --days windows; this script ingests one video URL at a time
Live streams (transcripts are not stable)
Non-YouTube sources (Vimeo, Twitch, Twitter Spaces have their own connectors)
One-off transcript reads where the user does not want a vault file (run yt-dlp --write-auto-sub directly and pipe to stdout)

How it works

Parse the input as one YouTube video URL.
Verify yt-dlp is installed. If not, the script exits with install instructions: brew install yt-dlp (macOS) or pip3 install --user yt-dlp.
Validate the URL as a single http(s) YouTube video and call yt-dlp --ignore-config --list-subs -- <url> to enumerate available subtitles.
Subtitle priority: manual subs > auto-generated captions. Manual subs preserve creator-provided punctuation and speaker labels; auto-gen is uppercase + no punctuation.
Download the highest-priority subtitle as VTT via yt-dlp --write-sub --sub-lang <lang> --skip-download. Default language preference: en,es (English first, Spanish second).
Strip VTT timing markers and merge into clean prose paragraphs. Deduplicate repeated lines (auto-generated VTTs are line-doubled). Preserve speaker labels if the source had them.
Pull video metadata (title, channel, upload date, duration, video_id, URL) via yt-dlp --print-json --skip-download.
Slugify the channel name and video title. Write to External Inputs/YouTube/<channel-slug>/<YYYY-MM-DD>-<video-slug>.md.
Scan transcript for trigger keywords (decision, framework, model, principle, "the lesson is", playbook, anti-pattern, case study). For each match, create a writing-seed stub at Meta/Captures/<YYYY-MM-DD>-youtube-<channel-slug>-<video-id>.md so the seed lands in the captures aggregator.
Print summary: file path, transcript word count, language, seeds detected.

Invocation

python3 ingest.py <youtube-url> [--vault <path>] [--lang <code>]

Defaults:

--vault: $VAULT_ROOT env var or current directory
--lang: en,es (English first, Spanish second; matches a common bilingual default)
--whisper: accepted as a future fallback flag, but this version writes a stub when no subtitles are available

Output contract

The vault file at External Inputs/YouTube/<channel-slug>/<YYYY-MM-DD>-<video-slug>.md has frontmatter:

---
type: external-input
source: youtube
video_id: <11-char ID>
url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<id>
channel: <channel-name>
channel_url: https://www.youtube.com/<handle>
title: <video title>
upload_date: <YYYY-MM-DD>
duration_seconds: <int>
language: <ISO code>
subtitle_source: manual | auto | whisper
word_count: <int>
ingested_at: <ISO 8601 timestamp>
---

Body is the cleaned transcript as paragraph prose. If the source had speaker labels, format as **<speaker>:** <text> per turn.

Idempotency

Re-ingesting the same video URL overwrites the same vault file. The seed stub filenames hash the video_id, so the same source video produces the same stub filename across re-runs. Re-runs refresh, never duplicate.

Missing subtitles

If yt-dlp --list-subs returns no manual or auto subtitles, the script writes a stub vault note with the video metadata and source URL instead of failing silently. The --whisper flag is reserved for a future local transcription fallback and currently reports that the fallback is not implemented.

For a manual fallback today, download audio with yt-dlp, transcribe it with your local Whisper workflow, and add captions or transcript text before rerunning the ingest.

Limitations

Ingests one YouTube video URL per run; channel handles, playlists, and --days windows are out of scope.
Depends on subtitles returned by yt-dlp; videos without subtitles produce a metadata stub, not a transcript.
Does not download video files or perform built-in Whisper transcription in this version.
Network availability, YouTube subtitle access, and local yt-dlp behavior determine whether ingest succeeds.

Acceptance test

Run against the first YouTube video ever uploaded:

python3 ingest.py "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw" --vault /tmp/test

Expected output:

Wrote 39 words to /tmp/test/External Inputs/YouTube/jawed/2005-04-24-me-at-the-zoo.md. Language: en. Subtitle source: manual.

The output file contains valid frontmatter and a clean prose body.

Dependencies

yt-dlp (required): install via brew install yt-dlp or pip3 install --user yt-dlp
whisper-cpp (optional for a manual fallback outside this script)

Source

Bundled in adelaidasofia/ai-brain-starter, a verification harness around an AI agent so memory compounds instead of corrupts. The skill is part of the ingest-* family of vault connectors.