video-to-text-openai

Transcribe video or audio into raw text and SRT subtitles through a reliable paid path: yt-dlp audio extraction plus OpenAI Whisper. Use this when video-to-text-groq is unavailable or quota-exceeded.

Input Fit

• YouTube URLs.
• Bilibili URLs.
• Douyin URLs.
• Xiaoyuzhou podcast URLs.
• Local audio files such as MP3, M4A, WAV, AAC, FLAC, OGG, and OPUS.
• Local video files such as MP4, MOV, MKV, AVI, WEBM, FLV, and M4V.

Invocation

Call transcribe.py's sync transcribe(url_or_path: str) function with the original URL or local file path:

result = transcribe("https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=example")

Successful calls return:

{
    "ok": True,
    "raw_txt": "...",
    "subtitle_srt": "1\n00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,100\n...\n",
    "meta": {
        "language": "en",
        "duration_sec": 123.4,
        "model": "whisper-1",
        "backend": "openai",
    },
    "audio_path": "audio.mp3",
    "source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch",
}

source is a query-stripped URL for URL input and only the basename for local file input. audio_path is always the prepared audio basename, never an absolute local or temporary path.

Failure Modes

• Missing OPENAI_API_KEY returns reason: missing_api_key.
• Unsupported URLs, network failures, and non-zero yt-dlp exits return reason: yt_dlp_failed.
• Missing local ffmpeg for video conversion returns reason: ffmpeg_missing.
• OpenAI rate limits return reason: rate_limited.
• Other OpenAI API 4xx or 5xx responses return reason: openai_api_error.
• Audio larger than 25 MB returns reason: audio_too_large.

Downgrade chain: use video-to-text-local on Apple Silicon with LM Studio when cloud transcription is unavailable or unsuitable. When possible, prefer video-to-text-groq (free tier) first and fall back to this skill for quality or quota reasons.

Limits

• Requires a paid OpenAI API key in OPENAI_API_KEY (pay-as-you-go, approximately $0.006/min for whisper-1).
• OpenAI rate limits and tier quotas can throttle bursts or long files.
• The upload cap is 25 MB per request; slice long media or use local transcription.
• URL extraction depends on yt-dlp support for the target platform and current site behavior.

This tool does not produce a summary. It returns raw_txt and subtitles so the runtime AI can decide how to process, summarize, quote, or cite the transcript.

Quality Bar

• Evidence items have non-empty title and url.
• No crash on empty or malformed API response.
• Source channel field matches the channel name.