algorembrant/videolink-to-transcript

⚡ Universal Media Transcriber

Convert YouTube, YouTube Music, Spotify, and direct audio/video URLs into transcript .txt files — extremely fast.

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✨ Features

Feature	Detail
Native captions	YouTube captions grabbed instantly — no audio download
Whisper fallback	faster-whisper (up to 4× faster than OpenAI Whisper)
Spotify	Tracks / albums / playlists via spotdl → Whisper
Direct audio	.mp3 .mp4 .wav .m4a .webm .ogg and more
Playlist support	Auto-expand playlists, channels, albums
Batch + parallel	Multiple URLs, concurrent workers
Smart cache	Re-run same URL instantly
Auto-install	Deps install themselves on first run

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🚀 Quick Start

# Single YouTube video
python transcriber.py https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID

# Multiple URLs
python transcriber.py URL1 URL2 URL3

# From a file (one URL per line)
python transcriber.py --file urls.txt

# Full YouTube playlist
python transcriber.py --playlist https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAYLIST_ID

# Spotify track
python transcriber.py https://open.spotify.com/track/TRACK_ID

# Force Whisper (ignore captions)
python transcriber.py URL --whisper

# Larger model for better accuracy
python transcriber.py URL --model large-v3

# Merge all into one file
python transcriber.py URL1 URL2 --merge

# Custom output folder
python transcriber.py URL --output ./my_transcripts

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🛠 Options

urls                  One or more media URLs
--file,    -f         Text file with one URL per line
--output,  -o         Output directory (default: ./transcripts)
--merge,   -m         Merge all transcripts into one file
--whisper, -w         Force Whisper (skip caption check)
--model               tiny | base | small | medium | large-v2 | large-v3
--workers             Parallel workers (default: 4)
--no-cache            Disable transcript cache
--playlist            Expand playlist/channel into individual videos
--clear-cache         Wipe the cache

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📦 Dependencies (auto-installed)

• yt-dlp — universal media downloader
• youtube-transcript-api — instant YouTube captions
• faster-whisper — optimized Whisper (CTranslate2)
• spotdl — Spotify downloader
• rich — terminal UI

Requires: ffmpeg installed on your system:

# macOS
brew install ffmpeg

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt install ffmpeg

# Windows
winget install ffmpeg

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⚡ Speed Guide

Source	Method	Speed
YouTube with captions	Native API	< 2 sec
YouTube no captions	Whisper base	~realtime
Spotify music	spotdl + Whisper	depends on length
Direct audio	Whisper	~realtime

Model accuracy vs speed: tiny → base → small → medium → large-v3
(fastest) (most accurate)

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📄 Output Format

======================================================================
TITLE    : My Video Title
UPLOADER : Channel Name
DURATION : 0:15:42
SOURCE   : youtube
METHOD   : native_captions
URL      : https://youtu.be/...
======================================================================

[0:00:00] Hello and welcome to this video...
[0:00:05] Today we're going to talk about...

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🗂 URL File Format

# urls.txt — lines starting with # are comments
https://youtu.be/VIDEO1
https://youtu.be/VIDEO2
https://open.spotify.com/track/TRACK_ID
https://example.com/podcast.mp3