Watchvideo

watchvideo
Local video analyzer for Claude Code. Paste a video URL. It downloads it, samples the frames, transcribes the audio on your own machine, reads what is on screen, researches the topic, and hands you a folder with the transcript, the hook breakdown, and whatever else you asked for.

watchvideo ships the watchvideo skill: one command that turns a video into something you can read, search, and steal from. It runs entirely on free local tooling, so a run costs nothing but CPU.

Built for creators, marketers, and anyone who studies video for a living and is tired of scrubbing a timeline with a notepad open.

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Step-by-step guide and setup walkthrough: watchvideo guide on charlieautomates.com

Why

An LLM cannot watch a video. So most "analyze this video" tools either read the title and guess, or send your video to a paid API and charge you per minute.

watchvideo does what a human analyst does, locally:

- Gets the file. yt-dlp pulls the video at 720p, plus the platform's own captions as a cross-check.
- Looks at it. ffmpeg samples frames and tiles them into contact sheets, 30 frames to an image. Claude reads those sheets directly. A 10-minute video at 1 frame per second is 600 loose files and fits in nothing; the same 600 frames tiled is 20 images.
- Listens to it. ffmpeg extracts 16 kHz mono audio and local Whisper transcribes it, with real segment timestamps. Nothing leaves the machine.
- Separates the two hooks. What the video *says* in the first three seconds and what it *shows* are different signals, and the mismatch between them is…