Comment by HPsquared
If you're going as far as using yt-dlp, why not run the audio through Whisper?
If you're going as far as using yt-dlp, why not run the audio through Whisper?
You can run it locally, and it's really fast. But since YouTube transcription is really good, I don't see why you'd use Whisper and get a worse transcription (unless maybe it's on videos that Google did not transcribe for whatever reason).
> But since YouTube transcription is really good
Are you sure you're looking at automatic transcripts? YouTube transcripts are bizarrely low quality if they're not provided by the creators (I've actually used my Google Pixel's live transcription to make better captions occasionally).
I just checked a video my girlfriend uploaded a week ago and the auto-transcript was still pretty messy. I've used Whisper for the same task and it's significantly better.
The security against downloading audio from YouTube has been upped recently with 'PO tokens'.
Whisper is only a few tenths of a cent per hour transcribed if transcribing on your gpu though, at about 30x real-time on a 3080 etc. with batching.
I haven't been following closely the last few weeks, but you can check the issues in this repo, for example: https://github.com/distubejs/ytdl-core
Interesting, I haven't used Whisper, is it cost effective? Seems to be about 36 cents per (hour long) video? How long does processing take?