Private videos and Docker

Private, members-only, age-gated, or region-restricted videos need the same browser session access that can view the video. NoteWise reads a Netscape-format cookies file when you pass --cookie-file or set YOUTUBE_COOKIE_FILE.

Cookie files are session tokens. Do not commit them, paste them into issues, or mount them writable in containers.

Cookies

notewise process "https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID" --cookie-file ./youtube-cookies.txt

For repeated use:

YOUTUBE_COOKIE_FILE=/absolute/path/youtube-cookies.txt notewise process "https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID"

If YouTube has no transcript for the selected language, NoteWise cannot generate notes from that video.

Docker

The published image is ghcr.io/whoisjayd/notewise:latest. The runtime uses Python 3.13 slim, user notewise with uid 1001, workdir /output, entrypoint notewise, and NOTEWISE_HOME=/home/notewise/.notewise.

docker run --rm \
  -e GEMINI_API_KEY="$GEMINI_API_KEY" \
  -v "$PWD/output:/output" \
  -v "$PWD/.notewise:/home/notewise/.notewise" \
  ghcr.io/whoisjayd/notewise:latest \
  process "https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID" --no-ui

With cookies:

docker run --rm \
  -e GEMINI_API_KEY="$GEMINI_API_KEY" \
  -v "$PWD/output:/output" \
  -v "$PWD/.notewise:/home/notewise/.notewise" \
  -v "$PWD/youtube-cookies.txt:/cookies/youtube.txt:ro" \
  ghcr.io/whoisjayd/notewise:latest \
  process "https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID" --cookie-file /cookies/youtube.txt --no-ui

Persist /home/notewise/.notewise if you want cache, logs, config, and OAuth token directories to survive container runs.

Last modified on May 1, 2026

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Private videos and Docker

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