YouTube Transcript Downloader for NetNewsWire

A tool that automatically identifies YouTube videos from your "read" list in NetNewsWire (RSS Reader) for the current day, extracts their transcripts, and saves them as text files.

Key Features

• NetNewsWire Integration: Reads recent articles directly from the local SQLite database.
• YouTube Filtering: Selects only YouTube links from your articles (excludes Shorts).
• Transcript Extraction: Uses yt-dlp to download auto-generated captions (default: English).
• Text Conversion: Converts VTT subtitle formats into readable plain text.
• Auto-Save: Saves the extracted transcripts to your ~/Downloads folder with the filename format [Video_Title]_transcript.txt.

Prerequisites

To run this project, you need the following tools installed:

1. Bun: JavaScript/TypeScript runtime

   curl -fsSL https://bun.sh/install | bash

2. yt-dlp: YouTube download tool

   brew install yt-dlp

   (If you don't use Homebrew, check the yt-dlp official repository)

3. NetNewsWire (macOS): RSS Reader App

   • This script is hardcoded to look for the NetNewsWire iCloud sync database path on macOS (~/Library/Containers/...).

Installation & Usage

1. Clone the repository and install dependencies

   git clone <repository-url>
   cd summarize-article
   bun install

2. Run the script

   bun start

Environment Variables (Optional)

The script looks for yt-dlp in your system PATH by default. If it cannot be found, you can specify the path manually using the YT_DLP_PATH environment variable.

YT_DLP_PATH=/usr/local/bin/yt-dlp bun start

How It Works

1. src/article.ts: Connects to NetNewsWire's SQLite DB and queries articles published today (adjusted for KST +9h).
2. src/index.ts: Filters the fetched articles for YouTube URLs and iterates through them.
3. src/fetch-youtube-script.ts: Executes yt-dlp as a child process to download subtitles, then cleans up timestamps and tags using regex to produce plain text.
4. Result: The final text file is saved to the user's Downloads folder.

Notes

• This tool is designed for macOS environments (due to file paths).
• NetNewsWire must be using iCloud Sync for the database to be found at the default path.
• Videos without captions/subtitles cannot be processed.