video-transcribe

Video Transcribe

Runs this repo's pipeline headlessly: platform subtitles when available (seconds), local Whisper as fallback, then optimize -> translate -> summarize.

Before running

The command must be run from the AI Video Transcriber repository root and needs the project virtualenv plus ffmpeg. Verify once per session:

ls venv/bin/python && command -v ffmpeg

• No venv: run ./install.sh, or python3 -m venv venv && venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt.
• No ffmpeg: install it first with brew install ffmpeg on macOS or sudo apt install ffmpeg on Debian/Ubuntu. Do not proceed without it; audio extraction will fail.

Run it

venv/bin/python transcribe.py "<URL or file path>" --json

Always pass --json: it puts machine-readable output on stdout and keeps progress chatter on stderr. Parse the JSON rather than scraping log lines.

Useful flags:

Flag	When to use
-l, --summary-language <code>	Summary language: en, zh, es, fr, de, it, pt, ru, ja, ko, ar. Default en
--no-llm	No API key is available, or the user only wants the raw transcript. Skips optimize/translate/summarize
--no-video	The user does not want the source video kept
--whisper-model small	Accuracy matters more than speed. tiny to large, default base
-o <dir>	Write the Markdown somewhere other than ./temp

The LLM steps need an OpenAI-compatible key via OPENAI_API_KEY and optionally OPENAI_BASE_URL. Without one the pipeline still transcribes but falls back to basic formatting; prefer --no-llm when the user only needs the transcript.

Provider settings:

export OPENAI_API_KEY="your_api_key_here"
export OPENAI_BASE_URL="https://openrouter.ai/api/v1"
export OPENAI_TRANSLATION_MODEL="gpt-4o"  # optional

For a one-off run, transcribe.py also accepts --api-key, --base-url, and --model. Prefer environment variables when possible so API keys are not written to shell history.

Reading the result

{
  "title": "...",
  "no_speech": false,
  "detected_language": "en",
  "files": { "raw": "...", "transcript": "...", "summary": "...", "translation": "..." },
  "media": { "path": "...", "kind": "video", "size_bytes": 2243691 }
}

Read the transcript and summary paths to get the content. translation is present only when the source language differs from the summary language.

Critical: no_speech