Watching videos
SkillFiles & storageThe user shared a video URL, a YouTube/TikTok/stream link, a local video file, a screen recording, a meeting recording, or a playlist/folder of videos — "watch this", "summarize this video", "what's in this recording". Use this to actually watch the video — download, extract frames, OCR, transcribe, and index it — instead of guessing from the title or asking the user to describe it.
Available today. Use it from your connected AI after setup.
No other account needed.
Connect ahel once, and every AI you use reads what you have installed.
Then ask your AI: use the Watching videos skill
What this skill tells your AI
The instructions your AI receives, as published by oxbshw/watch-skill in skills/watching-videos/SKILL.md and read by ahel’s review.
You don't have a video input; this skill gives you one. Anything a user hands you — a YouTube link, a TikTok, a lecture, a meeting recording, a screen capture, an .mp4 on disk — goes through the same pipeline: frames (scene-aware, deduplicated), OCR, transcript (captions first, local Whisper offline fallback), all persisted into one index.
Before watching: check the index
watch-skill list
If the video was already analyzed — this session or any earlier one —
do NOT watch it again. Ask it directly (see the asking-with-evidence
skill):
watch-skill ask <video_id> "<question>"
One video
watch-skill watch "<url-or-path>" [--start T --end T] [--max-frames N] [--transcript-only]
- Works on any yt-dlp-supported site (1800+), direct media URLs, HLS/DASH
manifests (
--duration 60bounds live streams), and local files. - Video over ~10 minutes and the user cares about one part → use
--start/--endfor dense sampling of that window. - User only needs what was said →
--transcript-only(fastest, often no video download at all).
The report prints Indexed: <video_id>, frames with t=MM:SS
timestamps, OCR text, and the transcript. Read every frame path listed —
in a single message, parallel Read calls — then answer from frames + OCR
- transcript, citing timestamps.
Many videos (playlist, channel, folder)
watch-skill batch "<playlist-url-or-folder>" [--limit N]
Everything lands in the same index; one broken video never stops the
rest. Afterwards a single watch-skill search "<phrase>" spans the whole
batch.
First run on a machine
If any command fails with a dependency error, run watch-skill doctor
once — it installs missing ffmpeg/yt-dlp itself. No API key is required
for any of this; transcription is local by default and the video file
never leaves the machine.
Signals
- GitHub stars
- 370
- Forks
- 52
- Last commit
- Sep 2026
Advanced
- Catalog kind
- skill
- Gateway key
watching-videos- Source
- github.com/oxbshw/watch-skill