Preventing Duplicate Notes

The plugin can check whether a transcript for the same video already exists in your vault before fetching:

  1. Enable "Prevent duplicate notes" in Settings → YouTube Transcript Settings → File Creation
  2. Set "Duplicate check property" to the YAML frontmatter key that holds the video URL or ID (default: url)
  3. When you fetch a transcript with "Create new file" enabled, the plugin will search all markdown files in your vault for a note whose frontmatter property matches the video
  4. If a duplicate is found, a notice will show the existing note's name and the operation is cancelled — no network request is made

How matching works

  • The frontmatter property value can be a full YouTube URL (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID), a short URL (https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID), or a bare video ID
  • All formats resolve to the same video ID for comparison, so different URL formats won't cause false negatives

Notes

  • The check only applies when "Create new file" is enabled — inserting into an existing note always proceeds
  • Only markdown files are checked; PDF and SRT files are not
  • The check uses Obsidian's in-memory metadata cache, so it adds no meaningful delay before the network request