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Comment by HPsquared | Hacker News Reader

If you're going as far as using yt-dlp, why not run the audio through Whisper?

Interesting, I haven't used Whisper, is it cost effective? Seems to be about 36 cents per (hour long) video? How long does processing take?

You can run it locally, and it's really fast. But since YouTube transcription is really good, I don't see why you'd use Whisper and get a worse transcription (unless maybe it's on videos that Google did not transcribe for whatever reason).

> But since YouTube transcription is really good

Are you sure you're looking at automatic transcripts? YouTube transcripts are bizarrely low quality if they're not provided by the creators (I've actually used my Google Pixel's live transcription to make better captions occasionally).

I just checked a video my girlfriend uploaded a week ago and the auto-transcript was still pretty messy. I've used Whisper for the same task and it's significantly better.

Agreed. However, you can get great YT transcriptions using GPT-4o mini to clean them up.

That's crazy, months ago I compared whisper v2 transcripts with YouTube transcripts generated on my video and found them to be identical, down to the timestamps.

I know people who upload a video on YouTube unlisted just to get transcripts generation for free and then delete the video.

36 cents an hour is how much it costs to hire an entire GPU like an A4000. I can assure you Whisper runs much, much faster than 1x!

A few derivative projects are faster than 1x, insanely-fast-whisper being the fastest I've tried.

whisper v3 large on release day was around 1x on a 4090

The security against downloading audio from YouTube has been upped recently with 'PO tokens'.

Whisper is only a few tenths of a cent per hour transcribed if transcribing on your gpu though, at about 30x real-time on a 3080 etc. with batching.

> The security against downloading audio from YouTube has been upped recently with 'PO tokens'.

do you have a source? more generally is there a community or news source for youtube "api" news like this?

I haven't been following closely the last few weeks, but you can check the issues in this repo, for example: https://github.com/distubejs/ytdl-core

Tbh I've not had trouble with this for personal use.

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