YouTube Transcript Downloader
Download the full transcript of any YouTube video instantly. Copy or export the captions as text. 100% free.
When should I use this tool?
- Extracting lecture captions to create searchable study notes
- Turning a long interview into a draft blog post outline
- Translating captioned tutorials through a separate translation tool
- Pulling quotes from a public talk for article research
How do I extract captions from a YouTube video?
- 1Copy the URL of a public YouTube video that has captions.
- 2Paste the link into the captions input field on the page.
- 3Click Fetch Captions to request the available subtitle tracks.
- 4Choose the language track you want if multiple are provided.
- 5Copy the extracted text or download it as a plain file.
Frequently asked questions
Which videos have captions available for extraction?
Any public YouTube video with either creator-uploaded captions or YouTube's automatically generated captions will work. Creators upload captions when they want precise wording, translations, or accessibility support; YouTube generates them automatically from the audio track for most other videos within a few hours of upload. Videos in the second category are visible with a CC toggle on the YouTube player itself — if you see captions there, the extractor can pull them here. Music videos, silent videos, and videos whose audio YouTube could not process will have no caption track; the extractor returns an empty result for those cases.
Are auto-generated captions accurate enough to use?
Auto-generated captions are accurate enough for search, reference, and rough note-taking, especially for clearly enunciated speech in widely trained languages like English, Spanish, and Mandarin. They are not accurate enough to publish as-is in a professional context. Expect wrong homophones, missing punctuation, capitalised names replaced with common words, and speaker-change boundaries mis-detected in multi-person recordings. If you need a polished transcript, treat the auto-generated version as a first draft and proof-read with the video playing. For a short podcast clip this takes under ten minutes; for a long recording, consider starting from scratch.
Does this tool work with unlisted or private videos?
No. The extractor can only reach captions that are part of a video's publicly accessible page. Unlisted and private videos are served behind YouTube's own authentication layer, which we do not integrate with, and attempting to bypass that layer would violate YouTube's terms and could break accessibility for legitimate uses. If you are the owner of an unlisted video, download the caption file directly from YouTube Studio instead; YouTube offers an Export button that gives you the same data in SRT or VTT format. That workflow keeps the video private while letting you work with the text.
Can I export captions with timestamps?
Yes. The exporter offers two output formats: a plain transcript suitable for reading or pasting into a document, and a timestamped SRT-style track suitable for re-importing into a video editor or a subtitle burner. The SRT output follows the conventional two-line structure with hour-minute-second-millisecond cues, so any video editor that reads SRT — including Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut, and most open-source tools — will pick it up without conversion. If you need VTT or another format, convert the SRT using our text tools after downloading.