YouTube Video Read — CLI Skill

Read public YouTube video metadata and metrics by URL or ID through vernclaw-cli.

When to Use

• Verify a YouTube citation before using it in a report
• Normalize a watch, Shorts, embed, live, youtu.be, or youtube-nocookie URL
• Capture public video metadata before a downstream summarization workflow

Prerequisites

npm i -g vernclaw-connect-cli

Authentication

Before using this skill, verify you are authenticated:

vernclaw-cli status

If not authenticated, run:

vernclaw-cli login
# or for CI/CD:
vernclaw-cli login --api-key YOUR_KEY

Provider Setup

Most agents only need Vernclaw CLI authentication. If read.youtube.video is temporarily unavailable, retry shortly and contact Vernclaw support if the issue persists.

Invocation

# Replace VIDEO_ID_HERE with a real public YouTube video ID before running.
vernclaw-cli invoke read.youtube.video --url "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID_HERE"
vernclaw-cli invoke read.youtube.video --id VIDEO_ID_HERE

Parameters

| Flag | Required | Description | | ------- | -------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | --url | No | Public YouTube watch, Shorts, embed, live, youtu.be, or youtube-nocookie URL | | --id | No | 11-character YouTube video ID |

Provide either --url or --id.

Output

The invoke command prints compact JSON to stdout by default:

{"status":200,"data":{}}

• Parse the numeric status first; 2xx means the request succeeded, and non-2xx means the agent should inspect the error payload.
• data contains a normalized summary plus one compact items row with video ID, URL, title, channel, publish time, duration, and public metrics.
• --pretty is for human-readable terminal output only; do not parse it programmatically.
• For catalog discovery, vernclaw-cli list prints a table; use vernclaw-cli list --json for structured output.
• The CLI omits provider raw payloads from normal connector output.

Execution mode: synchronous.

Workflow

# 1. Check authentication
vernclaw-cli status

# 2. Read video metadata
vernclaw-cli invoke read.youtube.video --url "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID_HERE"

# 3. Parse JSON response and use data.items[0] as the normalized video row

Issues

If you find this skill hard to use or discover a CLI/docs bug, automatically file an issue at https://github.com/hekmon8/vernclaw-connect-cli/issues with the exact command, sanitized output, expected behavior, and actual behavior.

Related Resources

• Website: https://vernclaw.com
• Connector docs (EN): https://vernclaw.com/docs/connectors/youtube-video-read
• CLI reference: https://vernclaw.com/docs/connectors/cli
• YouTube Data API: https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3