Updating Video Posts With Summaries and Transcripts

Complaint Department

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In case you haven’t noticed I haven’t been writing blog posts lately. Mostly I’ve been writing training material, and boy are my fingers tired.

Since the training material is getting recorded, making videos of stuff usually makes for a better practice run.

People love complaining about free stuff. Like Americans in Europe when they realize you have to ask for ice in your water.

Anyway, a step I have always been bad at has been providing a written summary of what’s in the video. It’s a step I can never bring myself to take after I’ve spent who knows how long writing and recording and thinking about the zillion other things I have to do with myself. It’s also not something that comes very naturally to me.

I hate doing it. I hate paperwork. I hate checkboxes. Why do I need to do this? The video title is self-documenting.

Pumping Irony

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So, hey, LLMs exist. LLMs can do things that I don’t have the mental energy to get set up to do.

I’ve been putting Claude Code to work on a bunch of stuff that would… Let’s be honest, it would never happen if I had to learn all the stuff around the perimeter of what I want to do. It’s a bit like the cloud in some ways. What used to be a rather monumental effort if you wanted to try to build something: domains, database servers, app servers, firewalls, and so on. All the stuff that would be a real impediment kinda became a click-a-few-buttons, spend-a-few-bucks, you’re free to do the thing you want now effort.

Where does the irony come in? Well, I got it in my head that I could have ol’ Claude build me a process that would:

• Download batches of YouTube videos
• Use local LLMs to generate summaries, chapters, and transcripts
• Automatically update my blog posts and YouTube videos with the appropriate text

I think right now, it’s mostly working. I’m starting with old videos so mistakes aren’t as obvious and public.

Back to the irony: The very thing that allows me to do this is probably also the thing that makes it far too late to do any of this, ha ha ha.

You’re all spare parts. Don’t forget it.

Along The Way

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The idea started off simply enough, and to be honest most of it just kinda worked.

• YouTube and WordPress have APIs
• Downloading videos is easy
• Local ollama server makes running LLMs on my M3 simple
• The LLMs I’m using (whisper for transcripts, qwen for summaries) don’t cost anything
• It’s mostly just a matter of writing stuff to logging files and working off that

Probably the only part that made life interesting was WordPress. Sometimes the semantic search for YouTube video name > WordPress blog post name wasn’t very confident. Sometimes it would find multiple posts with similar names. We had to expand the search to narrow the search, by falling back to (gasp!) keyword searches for YouTube URLs in post bodies, and then even further to what sort of link was used. Text links are different from embed links, after all.

So how’s it going now? Well, it takes some number of hours (depending on video length) to download and process the audio tracks. The YouTube updates are easy, it’s just one URL to the other. I have to manually check WordPress for some things before applying those, but that’s not so awful. It’s just reviewing a control file.

Sure, there have been some bugs and hiccups along the way. For example, refining the post matching: some posts got updated with summaries and transcripts that shouldn’t have. There’s also a weird thing happening where some posts will get the YouTube URL copied in a second time, but that doesn’t happen all the time. Anyway, I guess my point is: Yes, it’s imperfect, but it wouldn’t exist and I wouldn’t be doing this if I couldn’t have a robot do the monkey work. It does not take a tremendous amount of self-reflection for me to admit that if I had to do this myself, there would be a whole hell of a lot more bugs and hiccups.

After all, I’m a visionary. I’m a big picture kind of guy. I know where I want things to get to, but I’ll be darned if I can write a lick of python or C# or whatever else to do it. This probably shows in my stored procedures in a lot of places, too. I am not the most gifted logical thinker. I’m forgetful. Sometimes I’m in a rush. Sometimes I have one thought and get distracted by seeing a million things that I need to correct, do better, or forget how it works along the way.

A million rabbit holes later, I can barely remember the thing I was supposed to be doing.

For Your Enjoyment

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What you should see over the next days/weeks is old blog posts with videos getting updates to have summaries and transcripts, YouTube videos get updated to have summaries and chapters, and then finally, blessedly, to the great delight of Kevin Feasel (and potentially only Kevin Feasel), new videos having all this stuff when they publish.

Thanks for reading.

Going Further

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If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my training. Blog readers get 25% off the Everything Bundle — over 100 hours of performance tuning content. Need hands-on help? I offer consulting engagements from targeted investigations to ongoing retainers. Want a quick sanity check before committing to a full engagement? Schedule a call — no commitment required.