How coincidental - I needed exactly this just a couple days ago. I ended up vibecoding a script to feed an individual URL into yt-dlp then pipe the downloaded audio through Whisper - not quite the same thing as it's not downloading the _actual_ subtitles but rather generating its own transcription, but similar. I've only run it on a single video to test, but it seemed to work satisfactorily.

I haven't upgraded to bulk processing yet, but I imagine I'd look for some API to get "all URLs for a channel" and then process them in parallel.

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Franklinjobs617 11 hours ago | parent [-]

That is some fantastic validation, thank you! It’s cool to hear you already vibecoded a solution for this.

You've basically hit on the two main challenges:

Transcription Quality vs. Official Subtitles: The Whisper approach is brilliant for videos without captions, but the downside is potential errors, especially with specialized terminology. YTVidHub's core differentiator is leveraging the official (manual or auto-generated) captions provided by YouTube. When accuracy is crucial (like for research), getting that clean, time-synced file is essential.

The Bulk Challenge (Channel/Playlist Harvesting): You're spot on. We were just discussing that getting a full list of URLs for a channel is the biggest hurdle against API limits.

You actually mentioned the perfect workaround! We tap into that exact yt-dlp capability—passing the channel or playlist link to internally get all the video IDs. That's the most reliable way to create a large batch request. We then take that list of IDs and feed them into our own optimized, parallel extraction system to pull the subtitles only.

It's tricky to keep that pipeline stable against YouTube’s front-end changes, but using that list/channel parsing capability is definitely the right architectural starting point for handling bulk requests gracefully.

Quick question for you: For your analysis, is the SRT timestamp structure important (e.g., for aligning data), or would a plain TXT file suffice? We're optimizing the output options now and your use case is highly relevant.

Good luck with your script development! Let me know if you run into any other interesting architectural issues.

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loveparade 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I've built something similar before for my own use cases and one thing I'd push back on are official subtitles. Basically no video I care about has ever had "official" subtitles and the auto generated subtitles are significantly worse than what you get by piping content through an LLM. I used Gemini because it was the cheapest option and still did very well.

The biggest challenge with this approach is that you probably need to pass extra context to LLMs depending on the content. If you are researching a niche topic, there will be lots of mistakes if the audio isn't if high quality because that knowledge isn't in the LLM weights.

Another challenge is that I often wanted to extract content from live streams, but they are very long with lots of pauses, so I needed to do some cutting and processing on the audio clips.

In the app I built I would feed an RSS feed of video subscriptions in, and at the other end a fully built website with summaries, analysis, and transcriptions comes out that is automatically updated based on the youtube subscription rss feed.

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Franklinjobs617 7 hours ago | parent [-]

This is amazing feedback, thanks for sharing your deep experience with this problem space. You've clearly pushed past the 'download' step into true content analysis.

You've raised two absolutely critical architectural points that we're wrestling with:

Official Subtitles vs. LLM Transcription: You are 100% correct about auto-generated subs being junk. We view official subtitles as the "trusted baseline" when available (especially for major educational channels), but your experience with Gemini confirms that an optimized LLM-based transcription module is non-negotiable for niche, high-value content. We're planning to introduce an optional, higher-accuracy LLM-powered transcription feature to handle those cases where the official subs don't exist, specifically addressing the need to inject custom context (e.g., topic keywords) to improve accuracy on technical jargon.

The Automation Pipeline (RSS/RAG): This is the future. Your RSS-to-Website pipeline is exactly what turns a utility into a Research Engine. We want YTVidHub to be the first mile of that process. The challenges you mentioned—pre-processing long live stream audio—is exactly why our parallel processing architecture needs to be robust enough to handle the audio extraction and cleaning before the LLM call.

I'd be genuinely interested in learning more about your approach to pre-processing the live stream audio to remove pauses and dead air—that’s a huge performance bottleneck we’re trying to optimize. Any high-level insights you can share would be highly appreciated!

	▲	loveparade 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		For the long videos I just relied in ffmpeg to remove silence. It has lots of options for it, but you may need to fiddle with the parameters to make it work. I ended up with something like: ``` stream = ffmpeg.filter( stream, 'silenceremove', detection='rms', start_periods=1, start_duration=0, start_threshold='-40dB', stop_periods=-1, stop_duration=0.15, stop_threshold='-35dB', stop_silence=0.15 ) ```