YouTube Transcript Generator

CLI tool that downloads YouTube videos as audio and generates transcripts using OpenAI's Whisper API.

Requirements

• Python 3.13+
• uv
• ffmpeg (for audio conversion)
• OpenAI API key

Installation

git clone https://github.com/dbtreasure/Youtube-Transcript-Generator.git
cd Youtube-Transcript-Generator
uv sync

Create a .env file with your OpenAI API key:

OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-your-key-here

Usage

uv run yt-transcribe "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID"

Options

Option	Description
-o, --output-dir PATH	Base directory for output (default: ./transcripts)
--keep-audio / --no-keep-audio	Keep or delete the audio file after transcription (default: keep)

Output

For each video, creates a directory under ./transcripts/:

transcripts/
└── Video_Title_VIDEO_ID/
    ├── audio.mp3
    └── transcript.txt

How It Works

1. Fetches video metadata using yt-dlp
2. Downloads best quality audio and converts to MP3 (192kbps)
3. If audio exceeds 24MB, splits into 10-minute chunks (Whisper API limit is 25MB)
4. Sends audio to OpenAI Whisper API for transcription
5. Combines chunk transcripts and saves to transcript.txt

License

MIT