How to Install and Use Video Transcript Downloader in OpenClaw

Open your terminal and run the clawhub install command to add the video-transcript-downloader skill to your OpenClaw instance. This skill does not require a third-party API key for YouTube content — it uses YouTube's publicly accessible caption data. Installation is immediate and the skill is ready to use as soon as installation completes. After installation, you will see a confirmation message with the installed version and a note about supported platforms. YouTube is supported without configuration. Other platforms (Vimeo, Coursera, and others) may require additional configuration depending on the skill version installed. Run `clawhub info video-transcript-downloader` to see the full list of supported platforms and any optional configuration settings available in your installed version.

1clawhub install video-transcript-downloader

Open OpenClaw chat and paste a YouTube URL with a natural language request to download or extract the transcript. The skill recognizes YouTube URLs automatically and fetches the available caption data for the video. The skill first checks for manually uploaded transcript files (highest quality), then falls back to auto-generated captions if no manual transcript is available. Most YouTube videos have at least auto-generated captions in the video's primary language. Videos without any captions available will return an error message indicating that no transcript data is accessible for that video. The transcript output includes the full text of the video in the requested format — plain text by default, or with timestamps if you specify. For a 30-minute video, the transcript is typically 3,000-6,000 words. The skill returns the complete text inline in OpenClaw chat for shorter transcripts, or saves to a file for longer ones (over a configurable character limit). For your first test, use a short YouTube video (5-10 minutes) to quickly verify the skill is working before trying longer content.

For long transcripts or when you plan to use the transcript in other workflows, save the output directly to a file rather than receiving it inline in chat. You can specify the output file path in your prompt, or configure a default output directory in the skill settings. The skill supports several output formats: plain text (.txt), markdown (.md) with the video title as the heading, and JSON with timestamps and speaker labels if available. Markdown format is the most useful for knowledge base storage because it includes the video title, channel, and URL as metadata at the top of the file. For systematic knowledge management workflows, configure a default output directory and format in the skill's YAML config. This means every transcript download automatically saves to the right place in the right format without specifying it each time.

1# Configure skill defaults in ~/.openclaw/skills/video-transcript-downloader.yaml
2video-transcript-downloader:
3  output_format: markdown         # txt | markdown | json
4  output_directory: ~/transcripts  # default save location for transcript files
5  include_timestamps: false        # include timestamps inline with text
6  include_metadata: true           # include video title, channel, date at top
7  language_preference: en          # preferred language for multilingual videos
8  auto_save: true                  # always save to file rather than inline in chat
9  max_inline_chars: 3000           # show inline if shorter than this, else save to file

The most common use of the Video Transcript Downloader is as the first step in a two-skill workflow: download the transcript, then summarize it. You can ask OpenClaw to do both steps in a single prompt, and OpenClaw handles the pipeline automatically — downloading the transcript with this skill and then passing it to the summarize skill. This workflow is significantly more powerful than using the YouTube Summarizer skill alone for cases where you need to reference specific sections, search for exact quotes, or process the full text in additional ways. The YouTube Summarizer is more convenient for quick summaries, but transcript-then-summarize gives you both the complete text and the summary in one session. For research pipelines where you regularly process many videos, you can also batch multiple URLs in a single prompt — ask OpenClaw to download transcripts for a list of videos and save each to your transcripts folder, then summarize all of them in a single digest. RapidDev can help set up automated transcript ingestion workflows for teams that regularly process large volumes of video content — for example, automatically downloading and indexing conference talk transcripts or product demo recordings.