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A small cream vintage television on a wooden desk, glowing with a blurred lecture.

YouTube

Videos, playlists and whole channels

Talks, lectures and interviews are some of the best material on the internet, and some of the hardest to search. OpenWiki downloads their captions as plain text so you can read, grep and build on them.

One video, no key needed

Paste a link. The title and channel come from YouTube's public oEmbed endpoint, so you don't need an API key for single videos or lists of links.

$ openwiki youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw --folder Talks

That writes Talks/jNQXAC9IVRw.txt: a short header (title, channel, language) followed by the full transcript.

Playlists and channels

With a free YouTube Data API key, OpenWiki lists every upload on a channel, newest first, or every video in a playlist, and only downloads what you don't have yet.

$ openwiki youtube --channel @ycombinator --limit 20
$ openwiki youtube --playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL... --folder Course

Any language

Pass --lang hi,en to prefer certain caption languages. If none match, OpenWiki uses whatever track the video has instead of skipping it. Videos with no captions at all are remembered and never retried; rate limits are retried on the next run.

Next

Turn the transcripts into wiki pages with openwiki ingest --all. See how the wiki is built.