yt2doc 0.3.0

Transcribe any YouTube video into a structural Markdown document

yt2doc

yt2doc transcribes videos & audios online into readable Markdown documents.

Supported video/audio sources:

• YouTube
• Apple Podcast
• Twitter

yt2doc is meant to work fully locally, without invoking any external API. The OpenAI SDK dependency is required solely to interact with a local LLM server such as Ollama.

Check out some examples generated by yt2doc.

Why

There have been many existing projects that transcribe YouTube videos with Whisper and its variants, but most of them aimed to generate subtitles, while I had not found one that priortises readability. Whisper does not generate line break in its transcription, so transcribing a 20 mins long video without any post processing would give you a huge piece of text, without any line break or topic segmentation. This project aims to transcribe videos with that post processing.

Installation

Prerequisites

ffmepg is required to run yt2doc.

If you are running MacOS:

brew install ffmpeg

If you are on Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt install ffmpeg

If you are on Windows, follow the instruction on the ffmpeg website. If you have installed Scoop on Windows:

scoop install ffmpeg

Install yt2doc

Install with pipx:

pipx install yt2doc

Or install with uv:

uv tool install yt2doc

Upgrade

If you have already installed yt2doc but would like to upgrade to a later version:

pipx upgrade yt2doc

or with uv:

uv tool upgrade yt2doc

Usage

Get helping information:

yt2doc --help

Transcribe Video from Youtube or Twitter

To transcribe a video (on YouTube or Twitter) into a document:

yt2doc --video <video-url>

To save your transcription:

yt2doc --video <video-url> -o some_dir/transcription.md

Transcribe a YouTube playlist

To transcribe all videos from a YouTube playlist:

yt2doc --playlist <playlist-url> -o some_dir

Chapter unchaptered videos

(LLM server e.g. Ollama required) If the video is not chaptered, you can chapter it and add headings to each chapter:

yt2doc --video <video-url> --segment-unchaptered --llm-model <model-name>

Among smaller size models, gemma2:9b, llama3.1:8b, and qwen 2.5:7b work reasonably well.

By default, yt2doc talks to Ollama at http://localhost:11434/v1 to segment the text by topic. You can run yt2doc to interact with Ollama at a different address or port, a different (OpenAI-compatible) LLM server (e.g. vLLM, mistral.rs), or even OpenAI itself, by

yt2doc --video <video-url> --segment-unchaptered --llm-server <llm-server-url> --llm-api-key <llm-server-api-key> --llm-model <model-name>

Transcribe Apple Podcast

To transcribe a podcast episode on Apple Podcast:

yt2doc --audio <apple-podcast-episode-url> --segment-unchaptered --llm-model <model-name>

Whisper configuration

By default, yt2doc uses faster-whisper as transcription backend. You can run yt2doc with different faster-whisper configs (model size, device, compute type etc):

yt2doc --video <video-url> --whisper-model <model-name> --whisper-device <cpu|cuda|auto> --whisper-compute-type <compute_type>

For the meaning and choices of --whisper-model, --whisper-device and --whisper-compute-type, please refer to this comment of faster-whisper.

If you are running yt2doc on Apple Silicon, whisper.cpp gives much faster performance as it supports the Apple GPU. (A hacky) Support for whisper.cpp has been implemented:

yt2doc --video --whisper-backend whisper_cpp --whisper-cpp-executable <path-to-whisper-cpp-executable>  --whisper-cpp-model <path-to-whisper-cpp-model>

See https://github.com/shun-liang/yt2doc/issues/15 for more info on whisper.cpp integration.

Text segmentation configuration

yt2doc uses Segment Any Text (SaT) to segment the transcript into sentences and paragraphs. You can change the SaT model:

yt2doc --video <video-url> --sat-model <sat-model>

List of available SaT models here.

Ignore chapters from source

Sometimes, the chaptering of the video/audio at the source does not segment the content in the way you are happy about. You can ask yt2doc to ignore the source chaptering by

yt2doc --video <video-url> --ignore-chapters --segment-unchaptered --llm-model <model-name>

Run in Docker

To run yt2doc in Docker, first pull the image from ghcr:

docker pull ghcr.io/shun-liang/yt2doc

Then just run:

docker run ghcr.io/shun-liang/yt2doc --video <video-url>

If you are running Ollama (or any LLM server) locally and you want to segment the unchapter video/audio, you need to use the host network driver. Also, if you want to save the document to the host filesystem, you need mount a host directory to the Docker container. For example, if you run Ollam at http://localhost:11434 on host, and you want yt2doc to write to <directory-on-host> on the host filesystem, then

docker run --network="host" --mount type=bind,source=<directory-on-host>,target=/app  ghcr.io/shun-liang/yt2doc --video <video-url> --segment-unchaptered --llm-server http://host.docker.internal:11434/v1 --llm-model <llm-model> -o .