Vidscribe

Video Transcription (vidscribe)

Transcribe any video URL to text using cloud ASR APIs or a local Whisper model.

Prerequisites

System tools (must be installed):

• yt-dlp: downloads audio from 1000+ sites (pip install yt-dlp)
• ffmpeg: audio format conversion (brew install ffmpeg / apt install ffmpeg)

Python package:

• vidscribe: the transcription tool (pip install vidscribe)

If vidscribe is not installed, install it first:

pip install vidscribe

Provider Setup

vidscribe supports 5 ASR providers. At least one must be configured via environment variables in ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc:

If no provider credentials are found, ask the user which provider they want to use and help them set it up.

Usage

# Auto-detect provider from environment variables
vidscribe "<VIDEO_URL>" -o "<OUTPUT_PATH>"

# Specify provider explicitly
vidscribe "<VIDEO_URL>" -p <provider> -o "<OUTPUT_PATH>"

# Language hint for non-Chinese/English content
vidscribe "<VIDEO_URL>" -l ja-JP -o "<OUTPUT_PATH>"

Parameters:

• <VIDEO_URL>: Any video URL (Bilibili, YouTube, Douyin, Twitter, TikTok, Vimeo, etc.)
• -o <OUTPUT_PATH>: Where to save the transcript (omit to print to stdout)
• -p <provider>: Force a specific provider (volcengine, openai, aliyun, deepgram, local)
• -l <LANG>: Language hint (e.g. ja-JP, ko-KR, de-DE)
• --keep-audio: Also save the downloaded audio file

Workflow

The tool automatically:

1. Downloads audio via yt-dlp and converts to MP3
2. Uploads to a temporary host (cloud providers only) for the ASR API to access
3. Sends to the configured ASR provider for transcription
4. Outputs the full transcript text

Typical runtime: 1-3 minutes for a 15-20 min video (cloud providers).

Example

User says: "把这个视频转成文字 https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1xxxx"

vidscribe "https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1xxxx" -o /tmp/transcript.txt

Then read and present the output file to the user.

Troubleshooting

Cost