Agent skill · creative production · sickn33
youtube-notetaker
Turn YouTube talks into local study notes with slides, transcripts, editable annotations, and a markdown-backed viewer.
Why this skill is useful
Adds a complete workflow for managing YouTube video notes with scripts for downloading and serving content that the AI wouldn't reliably generate on its own.
What it needs
Requires ffmpeg, pillow, python3, pyyaml, yt-dlp installed locally. About 6k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-07. 44,571 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
YouTube Notetaker When to Use Use when this workflow matches the user request: > Source: dair-ai/dair-academy-plugins (MIT). Build a personal library of YouTube talks you study with. Each video becomes one plain markdown file: slide snapshots at their timestamps, a full timestamped transcript, and editable notes. A small bundled server renders the library as an interactive deep-dive in the browser. No database, no cloud service. Everything is files on disk you fully own. Architecture (read this first) The markdown library is the single source of truth. The artifact is a thin HTML shell that fetches from the server and writes notes back. Never hardcode video data into the HTML. Library: a plain folder, set by VIDEOLIBRARYDIR (default ~/video-deepdives/). One markdown file per video, filename slug = YouTube id (e.g. RtywqDFBYnQ.md). Frontmatter holds video metadata + a slides array. Body holds the full transcript as [HH:MM:SS] text lines. media/ holds slide images, namespaced per video as <youtubeid>-slide-NN.jpg to avoid collisions between videos. Server: scripts/serve.py, a single stdlib + PyYAML file. Start it with: It serves the artifact at / and a small API the artifact talks to: GET /api/video-deepdives (front page fetches this) lists every video. GET /api/video-deepdives/<id> returns one video {meta, body}. GET /api/video-deepdives/media/<file> serves a slide image. PATCH /api/video-deepdives/<id> with {fields:{slides:[...]}} writes notes back. It picks up new videos automatically the moment a markdown file exists. Adding a video means writing a markdown file + media; you almost never touch the HTML. The /api/video-deepdives URL namespace is local to the bundled server. Artifact: reference/artifact.html, served by serve.py at /. A clean reference copy; only rewrite it if the user wants a UI change. For new videos, leave it alone. Boundaries and current limitations Use only videos you are authorized to download and retain; do not bypass access controls. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills sickn33/youtube-notetaker--e29026