/watch

Give Claude the ability to watch any video.

Claude Code (recommended — auto-updates via marketplace):

/plugin marketplace add bradautomates/claude-video
/plugin install watch@claude-video

Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Gemini CLI, or any of 50+ Agent Skills hosts:

npx skills add bradautomates/claude-video -g

(-g installs globally for your user, available across all projects. Drop it to scope per-project.)

More install options (claude.ai web, manual) in the Install section below.

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 Reads 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.

How it works

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 Reads 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.

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 deduplication

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.

Detail modes — measured

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.

Install

Claude Code

/plugin marketplace add bradautomates/claude-video
/plugin install watch@claude-video

Update later with /plugin update watch@claude-video.

Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Gemini CLI, and 50+ other hosts

The Agent Skills CLI installs the skill into whatever agents it detects:

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.

Update later with npx skills update watch -g.

claude.ai (web)

1. Download watch.skill from the latest release.
2. Go to Settings → Capabilities → Skills.
3. Click + and drop the file in.

Enable "Code execution and file creation" under Capabilities first — the skill shells out to ffmpeg and yt-dlp, so it won't run without it.

Manual (developer)

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:

git clone https://github.com/bradautomates/claude-video.git
ln -s "$(pwd)/claude-video/skills/watch" ~/.claude/skills/watch   # or ~/.codex/skills/watch

For claude.ai, build the .skill bundle from source: bash skills/watch/scripts/build-skill.sh produces dist/watch.skill.

First run

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:

• macOS — auto-runs brew install ffmpeg yt-dlp.
• 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.

Usage

/watch https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ what happens at the 30 second mark?
/watch https://www.tiktok.com/@user/video/123 summarize this
/watch ~/Movies/screen-recording.mp4 when does the UI break?
/watch https://vimeo.com/123 what tools does she mention?

Focused on a specific section — denser frame budget, lower token cost:

/watch https://youtu.be/abc --start 2:15 --end 2:45
/watch video.mp4 --start 50 --end 60
/watch "$URL" --start 1:12:00            # from 1h12m to end

Other knobs (passed to scripts/watch.py):

• --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.
• --max-frames N — lower the frame cap for a tighter token budget.
• --resolution W — bump frame width to 1024 px when Claude needs to read on-screen text (slides, terminals, code).
• --fps F — override the auto-fps calculation (still capped at 2 fps).
• --whisper groq|openai — force a specific Whisper backend.
• --no-whisper — disable transcription entirely; frames only.
• --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 s