Video Fetcher to Markdown

A video link in, a structured archival Markdown note out. Capture the transcript, creator metadata, description, chapters, actual language, and provenance in one Obsidian-ready file, without an API key. YouTube captions are read directly; Instagram, TikTok, X, Vimeo, Facebook and other sites are transcribed on your own machine with Whisper, with a contact sheet of frames for short videos.

npx skills add JimmySadek/video-fetcher-to-markdown

Read the v2.0.0 release notes for other video sites, local Whisper transcription, frames, and the login-wall fallback.

Formerly YouTube Fetcher to Markdown. Existing installs keep working and keep updating: the skill is still named youtube-fetcher, and GitHub redirects the old address. npx skills update brings you the latest version.

An independent open-source tool, not affiliated with or endorsed by YouTube, Google, or any other video platform it reads.

What you get

Paste a YouTube link and receive a file such as:

~/yt_transcripts/2026-03-04_obsidian-the-king-of-learning-tools_[hSTy_BInQs8].md

---
title: "Obsidian: The King of Learning Tools (FULL GUIDE + SETUP)"
channel: "Odysseas"
url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSTy_BInQs8"
video_id: "hSTy_BInQs8"
fetched: "2026-03-04"
source_project: "my-project"
language: "en"
caption_type: "manual"
duration: "36m 26s"
upload_date: "2024-04-24"
tags:
  - yt-transcript
---

# Obsidian: The King of Learning Tools (FULL GUIDE + SETUP)

## Video Details
| Field    | Value |
|----------|-------|
| URL      | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSTy_BInQs8 |
| Channel  | Odysseas |
| Duration | 36m 26s |
| Uploaded | 2024-04-24 |
| Fetched  | 2026-03-04 |
| Source   | my-project |
| Language | en (manual) |

## Video Description
The creator's description, links, and chapter markers...

## Transcript
The complete caption text...

A video from another site gives the same kind of note, tagged media-transcript, with platform, creator, transcription_engine and transcription_model in the frontmatter, a Frames section that embeds the contact sheet with each tile's time, and a Whisper transcript with timestamps:

~/yt_transcripts/2026-10-07_claude-motion-tips_[instagram-dehp8dpsimi].md
~/yt_transcripts/2026-10-07_claude-motion-tips_[instagram-dehp8dpsimi].frames.jpg

The YAML frontmatter makes a collection queryable through tools such as Dataview, while the Markdown remains portable to Logseq, other knowledge bases, and plain text workflows.

Why this exists

Most transcript extractors stop at raw caption text. An archival knowledge note also needs the source URL, creator, capture date, actual language, description, chapters, and a predictable filename. Video Fetcher to Markdown keeps that complete record in one local file. Short social videos often show the real content on screen (tool names, prompts, links) rather than saying it, so notes from those sites include frames as well as words.

Features