Automating My Second Brain with YouTube Transcripts

Last week I spent 20 minutes searching for a video I'd watched months ago. Something about API rate limiting patterns. I knew the exact moment - the speaker drew a diagram on a whiteboard that clicked everything into place. But I couldn't find it. My Watch Later had 400+ videos. My bookmarks were useless.

That diagram is gone. I'll probably never find it.

This keeps happening. So I'm building a system to fix it.

The Core Insight

Once you have transcripts, everything becomes searchable. The video I lost? If I had the transcript, I could grep for "rate limit" and find it in seconds. I could feed it to an LLM for summarization. I could link it to my notes on API design.

The output format doesn't matter yet - blog posts, mindmaps, a searchable wiki, whatever. The bottleneck is getting the text out of videos and into my note system automatically.

My Current Workflow

Watch a video

Find something worth remembering

Clip with Obsidian Web Clipper

Creates a note with the URL in my vault

n8n runs periodically

Scans vault for notes with YouTube URLs missing transcripts

ytranscript fetches the transcript

CLI call from n8n's Execute Command node

Note gets enriched

Full transcript appended, now searchable

n8n is an open-source workflow automation tool - think Zapier but self-hosted. Obsidian Web Clipper saves web pages to your vault with one click.

Why I Built ytranscript

I tried existing solutions:

Third-party APIs (youtubetotranscript.com, etc.) - Work until they don't. Rate limits, downtime, sometimes paid.
Python's youtube-transcript-api - Good library, but I wanted something I could call from n8n without setting up a Python environment.
Browser extensions - Manual. The whole point is automation.

What I needed: a CLI I could call from a shell script or n8n node. Minimal setup, no API keys, no accounts.

So I built ytranscript. It uses YouTube's internal innertube API directly - the same one their web player uses.

Note: This tool uses an undocumented YouTube API that could change at any time. Not all videos have transcripts available (age-restricted, private, or videos without captions).

Usage

# Install globally
npm install -g @nadimtuhin/ytranscript

# Fetch a transcript
ytranscript get "https://youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"

# Or run without installing (npx)
npx @nadimtuhin/ytranscript get VIDEO_ID

# Check available languages
ytranscript info VIDEO_ID

# Output as SRT subtitles
ytranscript get VIDEO_ID --format srt -o captions.srt

In n8n, use the Execute Command node:

npx @nadimtuhin/ytranscript get "{{ $json.youtube_url }}" --format text

For bulk processing (e.g., your entire Watch Later export from Google Takeout):

ytranscript bulk --file video-ids.txt --out-jsonl transcripts.jsonl --resume

The --resume flag skips already-processed videos. I had a backlog of 200+ videos to process.

Rate limiting: YouTube will throttle aggressive requests. Use --pause-after 10 --pause-ms 5000 for large batches to avoid getting blocked.

MCP Integration

I also added an MCP server, so Claude can fetch transcripts directly. Add this to your Claude Desktop config (~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json on macOS):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ytranscript": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "ytranscript-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Or if you have it installed globally:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ytranscript": {
      "command": "ytranscript-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Now Claude can answer "summarize this YouTube video" without you copy-pasting anything.

What I Haven't Figured Out Yet

The transcript fetching works. What I'm still experimenting with:

Summarization - Should the n8n workflow call an LLM to generate a TL;DR? Or do I summarize on-demand when I revisit a note?
Tagging - Auto-extract topics and link to existing notes in my vault?
Format - Plain text dump, or structured with timestamps for jumping back to specific moments?

I'll write a follow-up once I've settled on something.