content-engine

Content Engine for Hermes Agent

One long video in, a week of content out. Paste a YouTube URL, get scored 45 to 60 second clips and per-platform social copy. Live in 90 seconds, no editing software.

What it does

Five tools in the content-engine toolset:

ce_fetch_transcript — fetch the timestamped transcript and metadata for a YouTube video.
ce_score_moments — score transcript segments and return the top non-overlapping 45 to 60 second clip candidates.
ce_write_copy — write a first draft of per-platform social copy from a clip transcript.
ce_cut_clips — cut clips from a downloaded video with ffmpeg, burning in subtitles.
ce_run — the whole pipeline in one call. Fetch, score, and draft copy.

The scoring uses four criteria, each 1 to 5, for a max of 20 plus a length bonus:

Hook — does the first sentence open with a specific case, number, or vivid image?
Completeness — is it a self-contained mini-story with no dangling references?
Standalone value — does a viewer who never saw the full video still walk away with something?
Visual payoff — does the narration line up with an illustration, photo, or footage?

Candidates are segment-aligned windows, scored, sorted, and deduped so the top picks do not overlap. The copy tool writes a deterministic first draft for X, Facebook, YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Instagram. The agent can refine the draft in chat.

Install

hermes plugins install PXMichael/content-engine
hermes plugins enable content-engine

Or from the catalog once listed:

hermes plugins install content-engine

Setup

Content Engine uses two external tools, both free:

yt-dlp downloads the transcript.
ffmpeg cuts the clips.

Both are found on PATH with shutil.which. No absolute binary paths are baked in. Install them and make sure they are on PATH.

No API keys. No model tokens. No account.

Demo

Paste a long YouTube URL into Hermes and run ce_run:

Run ce_run on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk and give me the top 3 clips with copy.

Hermes fetches the transcript, scores the moments, and returns the top clips with a first draft of the copy. The whole run takes about 8 seconds for an 18 minute video.

To cut the clips, download the source with yt-dlp and pass the path:

yt-dlp -f bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best -o source.mp4 <url>

Then call ce_cut_clips with the source path, the clip list, and the transcript segments.

How it works

Fetch — yt-dlp downloads the English captions (manual or auto-generated) and writes a VTT file. The plugin parses the VTT into timestamped segments.
Score — the plugin builds segment-aligned candidate windows, scores each on hook, completeness, standalone value, and visual payoff, then picks the top non-overlapping windows.
Copy — the plugin extracts the hook and the key fact from each clip and writes a first draft per platform. X and Facebook get the link. Shorts and TikTok get "Link in bio."
Cut — ffmpeg cuts each window, burns the subtitles, and writes horizontal and vertical mp4s.

Security notes

The plugin reads no secrets and no .env files. It needs no credentials.
It calls yt-dlp and ffmpeg through list-form subprocess calls with no shell. There is no approval step. The agent or user decides when to call a tool; the tool itself does not ask again.
Every URL is restricted to https:// on youtube.com, www.youtube.com, m.youtube.com, or youtu.be before yt-dlp sees it. Values starting with - are rejected so they cannot become yt-dlp options, and -- is passed before the URL in both calls.
Every output path is confined to get_hermes_home()/plugin-data/content-engine/. An absolute or ../ out_dir is rejected, and clip labels are limited to [A-Za-z0-9_-].
It makes network calls only to YouTube, through yt-dlp.
The copy tool writes a first draft. It does not post anywhere. You review and post.

Development

Validate like catalog CI does:

hermes plugins validate ./content-engine --install-deps

Run tests:

python -m pytest tests/

License

MIT

README from the reviewed commit 19e5ae8; it updates when the author re-pins.