Video Digest

video-digest

Overview

Turn any video into a single searchable Markdown digest. For each clip the skill produces three things and stitches them into one digest.md:

1. Transcript — the spoken words (faster-whisper, on-device).
2. On-screen text — every unique line of text visible in the frames (OCR),

with URLs and @handles pulled out separately.

1. Contact-sheet montages — grids of frames spanning the whole clip, so you

can read its visual story at a glance.

Everything runs locally. No network calls, no accounts, no telemetry. The core needs only ffmpeg; transcript and OCR are optional and degrade gracefully.

When to use

• "What's in this video / these 200 videos?" without watching them.
• Building a searchable catalogue of reels, talks, tutorials, or footage.
• Recovering the links and handles flashed on screen in a clip.
• Getting a fast visual overview (montages) of long or many recordings.

Not for: live streams, editing/cutting video, or generating video. This reads video and emits text + image summaries.

Quick reference

scripts/check-deps.sh                    # what's installed + how to get the rest
scripts/video-digest.sh clip.mp4         # one video → ./video-digest-out/clip/digest.md
scripts/video-digest.sh --out ~/digests *.mp4     # batch a whole folder
scripts/video-digest.sh --lang en talk.mov        # hint the transcript language
scripts/video-digest.sh --no-transcript reel.mp4  # skip audio, just visuals+text
scripts/video-digest.sh --ocr-engine tesseract x.mp4   # force a specific OCR engine

| Flag | Purpose | Default | |---|---|---| | -o, --out DIR | output root | ./video-digest-out | | --fps N | OCR frame sampling rate | 2 | | --montage-frames N | frames spread across the clip | 90 | | --tile CxR | montage grid | 3x3 | | --ocr-engine E | auto\|vision\|tesseract\|none | auto | | --whisper-model M | tiny\|base\|small\|medium(+.en) | small | | --whisper-python P | interpreter that has faster-whisper | auto-detected | | --lang CODE | transcript language hint | auto-detect | | --no-transcript / --no-ocr / --no-montage | skip a stage | — | | --force | re-run stages even if cached | off |

Run scripts/video-digest.sh --help for the full list.

How it works

The entry point scripts/video-digest.sh orchestrates three small, independent tools you can also run on their own:

| Stage | Script | Engine | |---|---|---| | Montages | scripts/montage.sh | ffmpeg tile filter | | On-screen text | scripts/ocr.sh (+ ocr_vision.swift) | macOS Vision (default) or tesseract | | Transcript | scripts/transcribe.py | faster-whisper |

Each stage is resumable — completed work is marked .done / cached and skipped on re-runs unless you pass --force. The digest is always rebuilt from whatever stages are present, so partial runs still produce a useful file.

OCR engine selection is automatic: on macOS it uses the built-in Vision framework (no install, on-device), otherwise tesseract if present, otherwise it skips OCR with a warning. See references/setup.md for installing optional backends and references/output-format.md for the exact output layout.

Common mistakes

• Empty transcript → faster-whisper isn't installed in the interpreter being

used. Run scripts/check-deps.sh, then pip install faster-whisper, or point at an existing env with --whisper-python /path/to/python.

• No on-screen text on Linux → install tesseract (apt install tesseract-ocr);

the Vision engine is macOS-only.

• Huge montage count on short clips → lower --montage-frames (e.g. 30).
• Wrong language transcript → pass --lang (e.g. --lang sk), or use a

non-.en model for multilingual audio.

Example

examples/sample-digest/ contains a tiny generated clip and the digest.md it produces — transcript, one detected URL, one @handle, and a montage sheet. Reproduce it with (the transcript line needs faster-whisper installed):

scripts/video-digest.sh --montage-frames 9 examples/sample-digest/sample.mp4

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: legenxxx
• Source: legenxxx/video-digest
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.