yt-dlp

Wraps the yt-dlp CLI. Use for metadata extraction, format listing, and (gated) downloads to local disk.

Use when

• "Download this video" / "grab the audio as mp3"
• "What's the title / duration / channel of this link?"
• Piping into openai-whisper for transcription (download audio → whisper)
• Piping into summarize with video metadata + captions

Do not use when

• Live streaming playback — use a media player
• Bulk scraping of large channels — run yt-dlp directly with a queue

Tools

• status — yt-dlp binary version + output dir
• info — url → title, duration, channel, upload date, webpage URL
• formats — url → list of available formats (id, ext, resolution, codecs, size)
• download — url + optional mode (video default / audio), format (yt-dlp -f selector), audio_format (mp3 default / m4a / opus), output_dir

Write gate

download requires YTDLP_ALLOW_DOWNLOAD=true. Without it, returns -32041.

Env

Var	Default
YTDLP_BIN	yt-dlp
YTDLP_OUTPUT_DIR	$TMPDIR/agent-yt-dlp
YTDLP_ALLOW_DOWNLOAD	— (must be true to download)

Typical flow

1. info to confirm the URL is valid and preview title/duration.
2. download with mode=audio for podcast-style content, then feed the output_path into openai-whisper → summarize.