YouTube Skills
Reliable YouTube search, channel browsing, playlist extraction, and transcripts for AI agents — built to work on VPS instances where built-in transcript fetching gets blocked.
What Is It
YouTube Skills is a skill pack that gives AI agents dependable YouTube capabilities: video search, channel browsing, playlist extraction, and — crucially — reliable transcript fetching. It works with Hermes Agent, OpenClaw, Claude Code, Cursor, and Windsurf.
The project exists because of a real-world pain point: Hermes’ built-in transcript fetch silently fails on many VPS instances, because YouTube blocks cloud and VPS IP ranges. YouTube Skills routes transcript requests through the TranscriptAPI backend (which processes millions of transcripts per month) to stay unblocked.
Key Features
| Feature | What it does |
|---|---|
| Video search | Find videos by query across YouTube |
| Channel browsing | Explore a channel’s videos and metadata |
| Playlist extraction | Pull full tracklists and metadata from playlists |
| Reliable transcripts | Fetch subtitles even from blocked IP ranges, via the TranscriptAPI backend |
| 12 sub-skills | Search → fetch → bulk extraction workflows that auto-invoke for creator lookups, topic research, and tutorials |
Getting Started
# Clone the skill pack
git clone https://github.com/ZeroPointRepo/youtube-skills.git
cd youtube-skills
# Copy the sub-skills into your Hermes skills directory
cp -r skills/* ~/.hermes/skills/After installation, ask your agent something like “summarize this video” or “find tutorials about MCP servers on YouTube” — the skills auto-invoke and handle the search and transcript fetching for you.
Why It Matters for Hermes Users
If your Hermes runs on a VPS (the most common deployment), this pack fixes a frustrating failure mode out of the box. It’s a textbook example of a community project solving a specific, real problem that the core project doesn’t handle.
Links
- Repository: github.com/ZeroPointRepo/youtube-skills
- Website: transcriptapi.com