yt-fts is a command line program that uses yt-dlp to scrape all of a youtube channels subtitles and load them into an sqlite database that is searchable from the command line. It allows you to query a channel for specific key word or phrase and will generate time stamped youtube urls to the video containing the keyword.

It also supports semantic search via the OpenAI embeddings API using chromadb.

• Blog Post
• Semantic Search
• CHANGELOG

pip install yt-fts

Dependencies:

This project requires yt-dlp installed globally. Platform specific installation instructions are available on the yt-dlp wiki.

pip

python3 -m pip install -U yt-dlp

MacOS/Homebrew

brew install yt-dlp

Windows/winget

winget install yt-dlp

Download subtitles for a channel.

Takes a channel url or id as an argument. Specify the number of jobs to parallelize the download with the --number-of-jobs option.

yt-fts download --number-of-jobs 5 "https://www.youtube.com/@3blue1brown"

List saved channels.

The (ss) next to the channel name indicates that the channel has semantic search enabled.

yt-fts list

┏━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ ID ┃ Name                  ┃ Count ┃ Channel ID               ┃
┡━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ 1  │ ChessPage1 (ss)       │ 19    │ UCO2QPmnJFjdvJ6ch-pe27dQ │
│ 2  │ 3Blue1Brown           │ 127   │ UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw │
│ 3  │ george hotz archive   │ 410   │ UCwgKmJM4ZJQRJ-U5NjvR2dg │
│ 4  │ The Tim Dillon Show   │ 288   │ UC4woSp8ITBoYDmjkukhEhxg │
│ 5  │ Academy of Ideas (ss) │ 190   │ UCiRiQGCHGjDLT9FQXFW0I3A │
└────┴───────────────────────┴───────┴──────────────────────────┘

Full text search for string in saved channels.

• The search string does not have to be a word for word and match
• Search strings are limited to 40 characters.

# search in all channels
yt-fts search "life in the big city" 

# search in specific channel
yt-fts search "life in the big city" --channel "The Tim Dillon Show" 

# search in specific channel by id
yt-fts search "life in the big city" -c 4

"Dennis would go hey life in the big city"

    Channel: The Tim Dillon Show
    Title: 154 - The 3 AM Episode - YouTube
    Time Stamp: 00:58:53.789
    Video ID: MhaG3Yfv1cU
    Link: https://youtu.be/MhaG3Yfv1cU?t=3530

Search in video

yt-fts search "text to search" --video [VIDEO_ID]

Advanced Search Syntax

The search string supports sqlite Enhanced Query Syntax. which includes things like prefix queries which you can use to match parts of a word.

yt-fts search "rea* kni* Mali*" --channel "The Tim Dillon Show" 

output:

"real knife fight down here in Malibu I"

    Channel: The Tim Dillon Show
    Title: #200 - Knife Fights In Malibu | The Tim Dillon Show - YouTube
    Time Stamp: 00:45:39.420
    Video ID: e79H5nxS65Q
    Link: https://youtu.be/e79H5nxS65Q?t=2736

Vector search, requires that you enable semantic search for a channel with get-embeddings. It has the same options as search but output will be sorted by similarity to the search string and the return limit is 10.

yt-fts vsearch "deep quote by russian author" --channel "Academy of Ideas"

"the great Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky above all don't 
lie to yourself he wrote the man who lies to"

    Distance: 0.25210678577423096
    Channel: Academy of Ideas - (UCiRiQGCHGjDLT9FQXFW0I3A)
    Title: The Psychology of Self-Deception - YouTube
    Time Stamp: 00:10:01.749
    Video ID: Uig8Lw7ixI0
    Link: https://youtu.be/Uig8Lw7ixI0?t=598

Export search results: For both the search and vsearch commands you can export the results to a csv file with the --export flag. and it will save the results to a csv file in the current directory.

yt-fts search "life in the big city" --export
yt-fts vsearch "existing in large metropolaten center" --export

Delete a channel: You can delete a channel with the delete command.

yt-fts delete --channel "3Blue1Brown"

Update a channel: The update command currently only works for full text search and will not update the semantic search embeddings.

yt-fts update --channel "3Blue1Brown"

You can enable semantic search for a channel by using the get-embeddings command. This feature requires an OpenAI API key set in the environment variable OPENAI_API_KEY, or you can pass the key with the --openai-api-key flag.

Fetches OpenAI embeddings for specified channel

yt-fts get-embeddings --channel "3Blue1Brown"

After the embeddings are saved you will see a (ss) next to the channel name when you list channels and you will be able to use the vsearch command for that channel.