yt-fts
Full-text search YouTube channel subtitles from the CLI
TLDR
Download a channel's subtitles into the DB
$ yt-fts download "[https://www.youtube.com/@channel]"
Search for a phrase$ yt-fts search "[keyword]"
Semantic search (embeddings; needs API key)$ yt-fts vsearch "[query]"
SYNOPSIS
yt-fts *command* [*options*]
DESCRIPTION
yt-fts scrapes subtitles with yt-dlp, stores them in SQLite, and supports keyword and optional semantic search that returns timestamped YouTube URLs. Install with pip install yt-fts.Note: Upstream has described the project as abandoned; it may still work but expects limited support.
PARAMETERS
download *channel_url*
Fetch subtitles (--jobs for parallelism).search *query*
Full-text search.vsearch *query*
Vector/semantic search when configured.update / list / export related commands
Maintain the local library—yt-fts --help.
CAVEATS
Abandoned upstream risk. YouTube may rate-limit or require cookies. Semantic features need OpenAI (or compatible) API keys and cost money. Respect YouTube ToS.
