video-lens

Paste a YouTube link into your agent. Get a report you read beside the video.

video-lens is a skill for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and other agents that read SKILL.md. It
writes a summary, the takeaway, numbered key points and a timestamped outline, and opens them in
your browser with the video playing beside the text. Click any line to jump there.

video-lens.org has the rest: an example report, every feature,
privacy, and all the ways to install.

Install

npx skills add kar2phi/video-lens
pip install youtube-transcript-api 'yt-dlp>=2026.8.19'

# Optional, Apple Silicon: transcribe videos that have no captions
pip install mlx-whisper && brew install ffmpeg

Works in any agent that reads SKILL.md. To install from a clone or as
a Raycast command, see docs/guide.md.

requirements.txt lists the Python packages. The first local transcription downloads a Whisper
model. YouTube Shorts are not supported.

Where the transcript comes from

video-lens reads YouTube's own captions first: fast, and nothing is downloaded. When a video has
no captions or they are blocked, it asks before it falls back to local transcription: yt-dlp
downloads the audio and Whisper transcribes it on your machine, then the report is written the
same way. This is slower than captions and needs the optional packages above.

Use

/video-lens https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...         # a report, opened in your browser
/video-lens <url> in Spanish, focus on the pricing part  # language or focus in your own words
/video-lens-gallery                                       # every report you made, searchable
/video-lens-recs what's new in Rust this week             # what to watch next, with reasons

Reports are saved under ~/Downloads/video-lens/reports/. After a report, say "share" for an
unlisted link on video-lens.org and "unshare" to delete it. Nothing is uploaded unless you ask.

Sharing, the gallery, recommendations and their privacy, Raycast and troubleshooting:
docs/guide.md. What changed: CHANGELOG.md.

Development

task test                 # fast suite, no network
task eval AGENT=claude    # real agent runs on the fixture videos

Tests, evals and the repo layout: docs/development.md. PRs welcome; the
sources of truth are skills/*/SKILL.md and viewer/.

Found a bug or have an idea? Open an issue
from the bug or feature template, or send a pull request.

License

MIT