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.
---
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 fetches captions first, downloads only what it needs, extracts frames (scene-aware, or fast keyframes at `efficient` detail), pulls a timestamped transcript (free captions when available, Whisper API as fallback), and `Read`s every frame as an image. By the time it answers, it has *seen* the video and *heard* the audio.
/watch https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ what happens at the 30 second mark?
```
## 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.
**Cut the hype out of an update video.**`/watch https://youtu.be/<launch-video> what's actually new — skip the hype` Strip a "game-changer" feature drop down to the few things that matter, so you get the substance without ten minutes of intro and overselling.
**Turn a playlist into notes.**`/watch https://youtu.be/<video> summarize this to a note` Run it across a series and file a per-video summary, so a channel or course becomes a searchable set of notes instead of hours you have to sit through.
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` checks captions first.** At `transcript` detail, captioned URLs return without downloading video. Otherwise, or when Whisper needs audio, it downloads only what the run needs.
3.**`ffmpeg` extracts frames at the chosen detail.** `efficient` decodes keyframes only (near-instant); `balanced`/`token-burner` prefer scene-change frames and fall back to the duration-aware uniform sampler when they under-produce. JPEGs are 512px wide by default and clamped to 1998px tall for Claude Read compatibility.
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 64 kbps mp3 audio clip (~480 kB/min) 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 `Read`s 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.
| Duration | Default frame budget | What you get |
|----------|---------------------|--------------|
| ≤30 s | ~30 frames | Dense — basically every key moment |
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.
Frame selection — keyframes (`efficient`), scene-change detection (`balanced`/`token-burner`), or the uniform sampler it falls back to — can still surface near-identical frames: a screen recording that holds one slide for 90 seconds produces a dozen, each billed as a separate image. A dedup pass drops them before frames reach Claude. It runs by default on every frame mode (`--no-dedup` turns it off):
1. One `ffmpeg` call scales each extracted JPEG to a 16×16 grayscale thumbnail. Everything after is pure-stdlib Python — no image libraries.
2. For each frame, compute the **mean absolute difference** against the *last frame that was kept* (average per-pixel brightness change, 0–255 scale).
3. If that difference is at or below the threshold (`2.0`), the frame is a near-duplicate and is dropped. Otherwise it's kept and becomes the new reference.
4. The frame-budget cap applies *after* dedup, so the budget is spent on distinct frames.
Comparing against the last *kept* frame (not the previous one) catches slow fades that never trip a frame-to-frame threshold. The threshold is deliberately low and measures absolute brightness rather than structure, so a one-line code diff, a terminal scrolling a row, or two differently-colored flat slides all survive.
The **Frames** line reports what was collapsed, e.g. `6 selected from 14 candidates (… 8 near-duplicates dropped …)`. On always-moving footage nothing is dropped and you pay what you would have anyway.
The `--detail` dial trades speed and token cost for visual fidelity. Numbers below are from a real run against a **49:08** YouTube video (1280×720, English auto-captions) — a long, mostly-static screen recording, the case that stresses the caps hardest. Extraction times are local CPU against a pre-downloaded copy; the one-time download was **~37 s** / 76 MB, shared by the three frame modes.
- **Image tokens** use Anthropic's `(width × height) / 750` — at the default 512px width these 720p frames are 512×288, **≈197 tokens/frame**; `--resolution 1024` roughly 4×s that. The transcript is surfaced in every captioned mode and on long videos is often the larger cost.
- **One sampling rule across frame modes.** Each detects all candidates across the full range, then even-samples (first + last always kept) down to its cap. The modes differ only in candidate *source* (keyframes vs. scene cuts) and cap, never in how coverage is spread — so the last frame always lands at the end, not partway through.
- **`efficient` is the speed tier** (~0.5 s) — it only reconstructs keyframes, so it's ~40× faster than the scene modes, which decode every frame to find cuts. It can also return *more* frames than `balanced` on low-motion footage (keyframes outnumber scene cuts); "efficient" means fast extraction, not fewer frames.
- **`token-burner` only diverges from `balanced` past the cap.** This clip had 116 cuts, so `balanced` sampled 100 and `token-burner` kept all 116. On high-motion video with hundreds of cuts, `token-burner` keeps everything (and trips the >250-frame token warning) while `balanced` thins to 100.
End-to-end from a cold URL, `transcript` is the cheapest mode by far; the frame modes add the shared ~37 s download on top of the extraction times above.
### Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Gemini CLI, and 50+ other hosts
The [Agent Skills](https://agentskills.io) CLI installs the skill into whatever agents it detects:
```bash
npx skills add bradautomates/claude-video -g
```
`-g` installs globally for your user (`~/.codex/skills`, `~/.cursor/skills`, etc.); drop it to install into the current project instead. Useful flags:
-`-a, --agent <names…>` — target specific hosts, e.g. `-a codex -a cursor`
-`-l, --list` — list the skills in this repo without installing
-`--copy` — copy files instead of symlinking (for filesystems without symlink support)
The CLI discovers the skill from `skills/watch/SKILL.md` and copies the whole folder — `SKILL.md` plus its `scripts/` runtime — as a self-contained unit. `SKILL.md` resolves its own scripts relative to wherever it was installed, so it works the same on every host.
Clone the repo and symlink the self-contained skill folder into your host's skills directory — the symlink keeps the install in sync with your working tree as you edit:
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:
- **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.
-`--detail transcript|efficient|balanced|token-burner` — fidelity/speed dial. `transcript` skips frames (transcript only); `efficient` uses fast keyframes (cap 50); `balanced` uses scene-aware frames (cap 100); `token-burner` is scene-aware and uncapped.
-`--timestamps T1,T2,…` — grab a frame at each absolute timestamp (`SS`/`MM:SS`/`HH:MM:SS`). Claude reads the transcript first, then targets the moments the presenter flags ("look here", "as you can see"). Added on top of the detail frames (reserved against the cap); out-of-window cues are dropped in focus mode; with `--detail transcript` these become the only frames.
-`--no-dedup` — keep near-duplicate frames. By default a frame-delta pass drops frames that are visually near-identical to the one before them (held slides, static screen recordings, paused video), so the frame budget is spent on distinct content; this flag turns that off.
- **Long-video accuracy depends on the detail mode.** On the capped modes (`efficient`, default `balanced`) coverage thins out past ~10 minutes — the frame cap spreads across the whole clip, so the script prints a "sparse scan" warning and you're better off re-running focused with `--start`/`--end`. `token-burner` lifts the cap and keeps *every* scene-change frame across the full video, so it stays complete on longer clips at the cost of more image tokens. The 10-minute mark is guidance for the capped modes, not a hard ceiling.
- **Detail is one dial.** Defaults are balanced: scene-aware frames, 2 fps max, 100-frame cap. Use `--detail efficient` for a fast 50-frame keyframe pass, or `--detail token-burner` for uncapped scene candidates. Set `WATCH_DETAIL` in `~/.config/watch/.env` to change the default.
Releasing: tag `vX.Y.Z`, push the tag. The workflow builds `dist/watch.skill` and attaches it to the GitHub release. Keep the version in sync across `skills/watch/SKILL.md`, `.claude-plugin/plugin.json`, and `.codex-plugin/plugin.json`.
Built by Brad Bonanno — I make content about building with AI on [YouTube (@bradbonanno)](https://www.youtube.com/@bradbonanno), and build AI operating systems for businesses at [Solaris Automation](https://www.solarisautomation.io/). If `/watch` saves you from scrubbing through a video, come say hi on the channel.
