skills/skills/pkm/youtube-video-capture/SKILL.md

name, description, disable-model-invocation

name	description	disable-model-invocation
youtube-video-capture	Fetch subtitles from a YouTube video, summarize the content, and save both the summary and raw subtitles to the Video bundle in the Obsidian vault. Use when the user wants to capture a YouTube video, mentions "summarize this video", "capture this talk", or pastes a YouTube URL wanting it saved to vault.	true

Capture a YouTube video into the Obsidian vault. Extract subtitles, produce a summary, and save both to the Video/ bundle as OKF-conformant notes.

Dependencies

yt-dlp must be installed. Check with which yt-dlp. If missing, tell the user to install it (pip install yt-dlp or brew install yt-dlp) and stop.

Extract subtitles

Run yt-dlp to download auto-generated English subtitles as SRT:

yt-dlp --write-auto-subs --sub-lang en-orig --convert-subs srt --skip-download -o "/tmp/yt-subs-%(id)s.%(ext)s" "<url>"

If no subtitles are available, tell the user and stop.

Read the SRT file. Strip timestamps and sequence numbers to produce clean, contiguous text for summarization.

Summarize

Produce a prose summary from the full subtitle text. Synthesize the content — do not regurgitate the transcript. Then extract key takeaways as a bulleted list.

Write to vault

The vault root is /home/sjb/Documents/sjb-brain/. The Video/ bundle is an OKF bundle. Create the directory if it doesn't exist, with an index.md and log.md following the pattern of other bundles in the vault.

Filenames

• Summary: YYYY-MM-DD_HH-mm_<kebab-case-title>.md
• Subtitle: YYYY-MM-DD_HH-mm_<kebab-case-title>.srt

Use the video title, kebab-cased.

Summary note

Write a markdown note with OKF v0.1 frontmatter:

---
id: <kebab-case-title>
type: Video Summary
aliases: []
tags: [video, youtube, <content-derived-tags>]
area: <derived-from-content-or-empty>
project: ''
---

Body:

• Video title as the note's # heading
• Link to the original YouTube URL
• The prose summary
• ## Key Takeaways with bulleted list
• ## Subtitle with a markdown link to the .srt file

Use standard markdown links, never [[wikilinks]].

Subtitle file

Copy the SRT file into Video/ alongside the summary. No frontmatter.

Bundle maintenance

After writing the pair:

1. Update Video/index.md — add the new summary under a ## Flat Notes or appropriate heading, with a one-line description.
2. Append an entry to Video/log.md noting the addition with a timestamp.

Safety

• If a filename collides, append a numeric suffix.
• Redact likely credentials, secrets, or tokens from any inline content.
• If the video has no subtitles, stop — do not attempt to transcribe.