What problem does it solve?
yt-dlp removes the need to manually manage YouTube/video downloads and transcription inputs by letting you programmatically fetch metadata, audio, and subtitles from a URL.
Core Features & Use Cases
- YouTube research without API keys: search via ytsearchN:query and pull structured metadata as JSON using metadata-only runs.
- Transcript and subtitle acquisition: fetch auto-generated captions (VTT) without downloading the full video for downstream cleaning and analysis.
- Audio extraction for speech-to-text pipelines: download and convert audio to MP3 to feed Whisper/Groq-style transcription workflows.
- Controlled format selection and rate safety: choose bestaudio/bestvideo+bestaudio and reduce throttling risk with retry/sleep/limit-rate options.
Quick Start
Ask your AI to search YouTube for "AI automation" and return JSON metadata plus English auto-transcripts for the top 5 results using yt-dlp.