9d • General discussion
YouTube press monitor
A friend asked me to help him automate something his team does manually every morning: scraping YouTube for new videos from European automotive press channels (EN/DE/IT/FR/ES), watching them, and producing a daily readable report.
Pure plumbing problem with one interesting analytical core. Here's what I'm building.
Goal Daily cron job → discover new videos from a channel allowlist → transcribe → analyze → human-readable report in inbox by 7am.
Stack:
- Discovery: yt-dlp (CLI, more reliable than YouTube Data API for our needs but we still need API for some metadata)
- Transcription: cascading strategy - YouTube transcripts first (free, instant when available), then faster-whisper large-v3 locally as fallback. Whisper API only if local becomes a bottleneck.
- Analysis: 2-stage Claude API calls. Stage 1 extracts structured facts per video (entities, claims, sentiment) into JSON. Stage 2 synthesizes the day's batch into a narrative report.
- State: Google Sheets (videos_log, daily_runs, etc.) - chosen over SQLite because the friend wants visibility into the pipeline without me building a UI.
- Storage: Google Drive for reports.
- Language/tooling: Python, uv (not pip/Poetry), Typer for CLI, dataclasses with type hints for row schemas.
- Deploy: Hetzner VPS, cron-triggered.
- Dev workflow: Claude Code with GSD framework (discuss → plan → execute → verify → ship per phase).
Key decisions I'm second-guessing:
- Google Sheets as state store. Solves visibility for free, but feels janky. SQLite would be cleaner but requires a separate dashboard. Anyone done this and regretted it?
- Two-call analysis (extract → synthesize) vs single-call. I think separation gives me debuggability and lets me regenerate reports without re-processing videos. But it's 2x API cost. Worth it?
- OAuth Desktop app + 7-day refresh token in Testing mode. Works for unattended cron because the job runs daily. But if I publish it (single user, no real "users"), do I unlock anything I actually need?
- Cascading transcription strategy. YT transcripts → faster-whisper → API. Sound or am I over-engineering for a low-volume MVP?
Any hint for me, my knowledgeable friends? :)
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YouTube press monitor
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