/watch

Give Claude the ability to watch any video.

Paste a URL or a local file and Claude watches it — scene-change frame extraction (one frame per cut instead of every-N-seconds), a 0-10s hook microscope (dense frames + word-level Whisper on the opening, where every video earns or loses your attention), and optional Obsidian auto-save so a watched video becomes a connected wiki entry without copy-paste.

▶ Watch the skill in action (this video is where /watch was born):

Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add taoufik123-collab/claude-watch
/plugin install watch@claude-watch

claude.ai (web): download watch.skill and drop it into Settings → Capabilities → Skills.

Codex / generic skills:

git clone https://github.com/taoufik123-collab/claude-watch.git ~/.codex/skills/watch

Zero config to start — yt-dlp and ffmpeg install on first run via brew on macOS (Linux/Windows print exact commands). Captions cover most public videos for free. Whisper API key is only needed when a video has no captions. Set $WATCH_VAULT_DIR to point at your Obsidian vault for auto-save, or leave it unset and the skill skips the ingest step quietly.

What's inside

• Scene-change frame extraction — scripts/frames.py grabs one frame per detected shot via ffmpeg's select=gt(scene,...), not a uniform tick every N seconds. Token cost stays flat on long videos because the frame count is bounded by the number of cuts, not the duration.
• 0-10s hook microscope — scripts/hook.py runs a denser 2 fps pass on the opening 10 seconds plus a word-level Whisper transcript, so the report tells you what was on screen as each word landed. The first 10 seconds is where every video either earns your attention or loses it.
• Structured report.md with Claude-fill markers — scripts/report.py emits a fixed-schema report (TL;DR, key moments, hook breakdown, editorial profile, quotable moments, entities, concepts, transcript) where narrative sections are explicit <!-- pending Claude fill: ... --> markers. Claude has a job-list to walk before ingest, not a blank doc.
• Optional Obsidian auto-save — Step 4.4 stages the report into $VAULT_DIR/raw/watched/<slug>/ and opens it via the obsidian:// URL scheme. Step 4.5 offers ingest into the vault's wiki. Both steps skip cleanly when no vault is detected. Vault path is resolved from $WATCH_VAULT_DIR or auto-detected from ~/Second brain/, ~/Documents/Obsidian/, ~/Obsidian/.

The core pipeline — yt-dlp download, ffmpeg frames, Groq/OpenAI Whisper backends, the --start/--end focused mode, the SessionStart hook, the multi-surface install — comes from the original claude-video project and works unchanged (see Credits).

Claude can read a webpage, run a script, browse a repo. What it can't do, out of the box, is watch a video. You paste a YouTube link and it has to either guess from the title or pull a transcript that's missing 90% of what's on screen.

With Claude Video /watch you can paste a URL or a local path, ask a question, and Claude downloads the video, extracts frames at an auto-scaled rate, pulls a timestamped transcript (free captions when available, Whisper API as fallback), and Reads every frame as an image. By the time it answers, it has seen the video and heard the audio.

/watch https://youtu.be/iYG5tiFfK3E how does this creator hook the viewer in the first 45 seconds?

Why this exists

I built this because I'm constantly using video to keep up with content. If I see a YouTube video that's blowing up, I want to know how the creator structured the hook — what's on screen in the first 3 seconds, what they said, why it worked. That used to mean watching it myself with a notepad. Now I just paste the URL and ask.

The other half is summarization. Most YouTube videos don't deserve 20 minutes of my attention. I hand the URL to Claude, it pulls the transcript, and tells me what actually happened. If the visual matters, frames come along too. If it's a podcast or a talking head, transcript is enough.

Claude is great at reading and synthesizing — but until now, video was the one input I couldn't hand it. Pasting a YouTube link got you nothing useful. /watch closes that gap.

What people actually use it for

Analyze someone else's content. /watch https://youtu.be/<viral-video> what hook did they open with? Claude looks at the first frames, reads the opening transcript, breaks down the structure. Same for ad creative, competitor launches, podcast intros, anything where the how matters as much as the what.

Diagnose a bug from a video. Someone sends you a screen recording of something broken. /watch bug-repro.mov what's going wrong? Claude watches the recording, finds the frame where the issue appears, describes what's on screen, often catches the cause without you ever opening the file.

Summarize a video. /watch https://youtu.be/<long-thing> summarize this does the obvious thing — pulls the structure, the key moments, what was actually said and shown. Faster than watching at 2x.

How it works

1. You paste a video and a question. URL (anything yt-dlp supports — YouTube, Loom, TikTok, X, Instagram, plus a few hundred more) or a local path (.mp4, .mov, .mkv, .webm).
2. yt-dlp downloads it. For URLs, into a temp working directory. For local files, no download — just probed in place.
3. ffmpeg extracts frames at an auto-scaled rate. The frame budget is duration-aware: ≤30s gets ~30 frames, 30-60s gets ~40, 1-3min gets ~60, 3-10min gets ~80, longer gets 100 sparsely. Hard ceilings: 2 fps, 100 frames. JPEGs at 512px wide by default — bump with --resolution 1024 if Claude needs to read on-screen text.
4. The transcript comes from one of two places. First try: yt-dlp pulls native captions (manual or auto-generated) from the source. Free, instant, accurate-ish. Fallback: extract a mono 16 kHz audio clip and ship it to Whisper — Groq's whisper-large-v3 (preferred — cheaper and faster) or OpenAI's whisper-1.
5. Frames + transcript are handed to Claude. The script prints frame paths with t=MM:SS markers and the transcript with timestamps. Claude Reads each frame in parallel — JPEGs render directly as images in its context.
6. Claude answers grounded in what's actually on screen and in the audio. Not "based on the description" or "according to the title." It saw the frames. It heard the transcript. It answers the way someone who watched the video would.
7. Cleanup. The script prints a working directory at the end. If you're not asking follow-ups, Claude removes it.

Frame budget — why it matters

Token cost is dominated by frames. Every frame is an image; image tokens add up fast. The script's auto-fps logic exists so you don't blow your context budget on a sparse scan of a 30-minute video that would have been better answered by a focused 30-second window.

When the user names a moment ("around 2:30", "the last 30 seconds", "from 0:45 to 1:00"), pass --start / --end. Focused mode gets denser per-second budgets, capped at 2 fps. Far more useful than a sparse pass over the whole thing.

Install

Claude Code

/plugin marketplace add taoufik123-collab/claude-watch
/plugin install watch@claude-watch

Update later with /plugin update watch@claude-watch.

claude.ai (web)

1. Download watch.skill from the latest release.
2. Go to Settings → Capabilities → Skills.
3. Click + and drop the file in.

Enable "Code execution and file creation" under Capabilities first — the skill shells out to ffmpeg and yt-dlp, so it won't run without it.

Codex

git clone https://github.com/taoufik123-collab/claude-watch.git ~/.codex/skills/watch

Manual (developer)

git clone https://github.com/taoufik123-collab/claude-watch.git ~/.claude/skills/watch

First run

On the first /watch call, the skill runs scripts/setup.py --check. If ffmpeg / yt-dlp aren't on your PATH, or no Whisper API key is set, it walks you through fixing it:

• macOS — auto-runs brew install ffmpeg yt-dlp.
• Linux — prints the exact apt / dnf / pipx commands.
• Windows — prints the winget / pip commands.
• API key — scaffolds ~/.config/watch/.env (mode 0600) with commented placeholders for GROQ_API_KEY (preferred) and OPENAI_API_KEY.

After setup, preflight is silent and /watch just works. The check is a sub-100ms lookup, so it doesn't slow you down on subsequent runs.

Bring your own keys

Captions cover the majority of public videos for free. The Whisper fallback only kicks in when a video genuinely has no caption track — typically local files, TikToks, some Vimeos, and the occasional caption-less YouTube upload.

Usage

/watch https://youtu.be/iYG5tiFfK3E how does this creator hook the viewer in the first 45 seconds?
/watch https://www.tiktok.com/@user/video/123 summarize this
/watch ~/Movies/screen-recording.mp4 when does the UI break?
/watch https://vimeo.com/123 what tools does she mention?

Focused on a specific section — denser frame budget, lower token cost:

/watch https://youtu.be/abc --start 2:15 --end 2:45
/watch video.mp4 --start 50 --end 60
/watch "$URL" --start 1:12:00            # from 1h12m to end

Other knobs (passed to scripts/watch.py):

• --max-frames N — lower the frame cap for a tighter token budget.
• --resolution W — bump frame width to 1024 px when Claude needs to read on-screen text (slides, terminals, code).
• --fps F — override the auto-fps calculation (still capped at 2 fps).
• --whisper groq|openai — force a specific Whisper backend.
• --no-whisper — disable transcription entirely; frames only.
• --out-dir DIR — keep working files somewhere specific (default: auto-generated tmp dir).

Limits

• Best accuracy: under 10 minutes. Past that the script prints a "sparse scan" warning — re-run focused on the part you actually care about with --start/--end.
• Hard caps: 2 fps, 100 frames. Frame count drives token cost; the script enforces this even when the auto-fps math would imply higher.
• Whisper upload limit: 25 MB. At mono 16 kHz that's about 50 minutes of audio. Longer videos need either captions or --start/--end to a smaller window.
• No private platforms. This skill doesn't log into anything. Public URLs and local files only. If yt-dlp can't reach it without auth, neither can /watch.

Structure

.
├── SKILL.md                 # skill contract — loaded by all three surfaces
├── scripts/
│   ├── watch.py             # entry point — orchestrates download → frames → transcript
│   ├── download.py          # yt-dlp wrapper
│   ├── frames.py            # ffmpeg frame extraction + auto-fps logic
│   ├── transcribe.py        # VTT parsing + dedupe + Whisper orchestration
│   ├── whisper.py           # Groq / OpenAI clients (pure stdlib)
│   ├── setup.py             # preflight + installer
│   └── build-skill.sh       # build dist/watch.skill for claude.ai upload
├── hooks/                   # SessionStart status hook (Claude Code only)
├── .claude-plugin/          # plugin.json + marketplace.json (Claude Code)
├── .codex-plugin/           # codex packaging
└── .github/workflows/       # release.yml — auto-builds watch.skill on tag push

Develop

# Build the claude.ai upload bundle:
bash scripts/build-skill.sh      # → dist/watch.skill

Releasing: tag vX.Y.Z, push the tag. The workflow builds dist/watch.skill and attaches it to the GitHub release.

See CHANGELOG.md for version history.

Who made this

I'm Taoufik. I build AI agents and tools like /watch, and I make videos about how I build them: @TaoufikAI on YouTube. If this skill saved you time, the channel is where the next ones show up first. Subscribe here.

Credits

Built on the original claude-video project, MIT licensed. Full attribution in AUTHORS.md and LICENSE.

Open source

MIT license.

Built on yt-dlp, ffmpeg, and Claude's multimodal Read tool. Whisper transcription via Groq or OpenAI.

github.com/taoufik123-collab/claude-watch · Credits · LICENSE