Watching videos

SkillFiles & storage

The 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.

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 60 bounds live streams), and local files.
  • Video over ~10 minutes and the user cares about one part → use --start/--end for 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