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mrcarlsama/mrcarlsama-social-transcriber-skill

17PythonAudience · vibe coderComplexity · 2/5Setup · easy

TLDR

A skill for AI coding agents that downloads a single Douyin or Xiaohongshu video, extracts the audio, transcribes speech locally, and saves a subtitle file plus metadata with no global installs required.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((social-transcriber-skill))
    What it does
      Download one video link
      Extract audio
      Transcribe speech
      Save subtitle file
    Supported platforms
      Douyin
      Xiaohongshu
      Image posts
    Tech stack
      Python
      faster-whisper
      yt-dlp
      Playwright
    Output files
      Video and audio
      SRT subtitles
      Word-timed transcript
      Metadata folder
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Code map

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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Download a Douyin video and get a local subtitle file plus word-timed transcript for translation or repurposing.

USE CASE 2

Transcribe a Xiaohongshu video to text without installing Python, ffmpeg, or Whisper globally.

USE CASE 3

Pull metadata such as title, author, and engagement counts from a Chinese social media video to analyze content.

Tech stack

Pythonfaster-whisperyt-dlpPlaywrightffmpeg

Getting it running

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 30min

Only the uv Python package manager needs to be pre-installed, faster-whisper, yt-dlp, and ffmpeg are auto-installed on first run.

In plain English

This is a skill for Codex and Claude Code that processes a single Douyin (the Chinese TikTok) or Xiaohongshu (RedNote) video link and saves it as local files. Given a video link, the skill downloads the video, extracts the audio, runs speech-to-text transcription locally, and produces a subtitle file plus a word-level timestamped transcript. It also saves platform metadata such as the title, description, author name, publication time, and engagement counts where the platform returns them. The skill is not a bulk scraper. It handles one link at a time and does not support downloading a creator's full channel, searching for content, or accessing private or paid content. Setup requires only the uv Python package manager to be installed first. All other dependencies, including yt-dlp for downloading, faster-whisper for transcription, imageio-ffmpeg for audio extraction, and Playwright for generating visitor cookies when needed, are declared inside the scripts themselves and installed automatically by uv on first run. No global Python, ffmpeg, or other tools need to be pre-installed. No GPU is required, though transcribing long videos on CPU will be slow. For cookie handling, the skill first attempts a bare download. If the platform requires cookies, it generates a temporary visitor-state cookie by loading the public page in an isolated browser context. It does not read your browser's saved logins, and the temporary cookie file is deleted after the task. You can also supply your own cookie file explicitly as a fallback. Output files land in a timestamped folder under outputs/. A video link produces the downloaded video, the extracted audio, the raw ASR transcript, a polished transcript generated by the AI assistant, a .srt subtitle file, and a metadata folder with manifest, report, and word-timing files. Xiaohongshu image posts are also supported and produce only the images and text description without audio processing.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Use the social-transcriber-skill to download this Douyin link and give me a polished transcript from the audio: [paste link]
Prompt 2
I have a Xiaohongshu video link. Use this skill to download it, transcribe the audio, and save a .srt subtitle file to my outputs folder.
Prompt 3
Run the social-transcriber-skill on this video link and show me the metadata JSON it produces including author name and engagement counts.
Prompt 4
The skill failed with a cookie error on this Xiaohongshu link. Walk me through supplying a custom cookie file as a fallback so the download succeeds.
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