YouTube to Flashcard

Turn any captioned YouTube video into study-ready flashcard assets — one folder per caption line, each containing an audio clip, a video frame, and the subtitle text. Then upload directly to Anki.

What It Does

1. Downloads a YouTube video via yt-dlp
2. Extracts captions (manual or auto-generated)
3. Splits the video into per-sentence segments
4. Saves each segment as a card folder:

card_001/
  audio.mp3   — the spoken line
  frame.jpg   — screenshot from that moment
  text.txt    — the caption text

5. Anki Upload — search through generated cards, select sentences, and upload to Anki with:
   • Sentence + audio + screenshot
   • Dictionary lookups (German or Japanese)
   • Word-level TTS audio

Screenshots

Searching through downloaded cards

Uploading to Anki

Supported Languages

Language	EN Dictionary	Native Dictionary	TTS Voice
German	dict.cc	DWDS / Wiktionary	Anna (macOS)
Japanese	Jisho.org	Kotobank	Kyoko (macOS)

Example Output

Source: Resident Evil Requiem #09 (German auto-captions)

Frame:

Text:

gerade glaube ich hier ein bisschen

Audio: Listen to audio clip

Requirements

• Python 3.10+
• yt-dlp
• ffmpeg
• Node.js (required for YouTube's JS challenge solver)
• Anki + AnkiConnect (for Anki upload feature)

macOS (Homebrew)

brew install yt-dlp ffmpeg node

Python dependencies

pip install pywebview psutil

Quick Start

Run the desktop app

python app.py

Or double-click the YouTube to Flashcard.app if you have the built app.

Or use the CLI

python youtube_to_cards.py "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID"
python youtube_to_cards.py "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID" -o my_cards -l de

Options

Flag	Description	Default
-o, --output	Output directory	output
-l, --lang	Caption language code (e.g. en, de, ja)	auto-detect

Notes

• Only works with videos that have captions (manual or auto-generated). Videos without captions will show an error.
• Video quality can be set to 480p or 720p in the app to balance download speed and quality.
• If YouTube blocks the download with a bot check, make sure you are logged into YouTube in Chrome. The app automatically uses Chrome cookies for authentication.
• As a fallback, you can export cookies via the "Get cookies.txt LOCALLY" browser extension and load them in the app.
• Auto-generated captions are automatically de-duplicated to remove repeated fragments.