YouTubeTranscriptCopy Videos, playlists and channels

Single video

YouTube Transcript

Paste a YouTube link and get the transcript back in a couple of seconds — either as flowing text you can read and copy, or one line per caption cue with timestamps.

Paste a YouTube video link

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Paste a YouTube link above and press Fetch transcripts. Each video comes back as its own card.

Any link shape works

Videos, Shorts, playlists, channels, or a bare video ID. Duplicates are removed.

Real captions, not guesses

Human-written captions are preferred, with YouTube's automatic ones as the fallback.

Copy or download

Copy as clean prose or with timestamps, or export TXT, SRT, VTT and JSON.

Playlists and channels

Process a whole playlist or channel in the background and watch progress as it goes.

How to get a YouTube transcript

  1. Copy the video's address from your browser, or use the Share button in the YouTube app.
  2. Paste it into the box above. Watch links, youtu.be links, Shorts, embeds and a bare video ID all work.
  3. Press Fetch transcripts.
  4. Read it on the card, then use Copy or the download menu.

Two ways to read it

Clean joins the caption cues into readable prose and starts a new paragraph wherever the speaker paused. This is what you want for notes, quoting or feeding into a summariser.

Timestamps keeps one line per cue with its start time, so you can jump back to the exact moment in the video. Switching between the two is instant and does not re-fetch anything.

Output formats

  • Plain text (.txt) — the whole transcript as readable prose, ready to paste.
  • Timestamped text (.txt) — one line per caption cue, each with its start time.
  • Subtitles (.srt) — the format most video editors and players import.
  • WebVTT (.vtt) — the web standard subtitle format.
  • JSON (.json) — every cue with its start time and duration, for scripting.

Limitations

Transcripts are read from the captions YouTube already publishes for a video. This tool does not download video or audio files, and it does not run speech recognition — so a video with no captions of any kind cannot be transcribed here.

Human-written captions are preferred where they exist, because they handle names, technical terms and sentence boundaries far better than automatic ones. Automatic captions are used as the fallback.

Frequently asked questions

Can I get the transcript of a video with no captions?
No. The transcript comes from captions YouTube already has. If a video has none, there is nothing to retrieve and this tool will tell you so rather than guessing.
Why does the transcript say "auto-generated"?
That means YouTube produced it by recognising the audio rather than a person writing it. It is usually accurate but can mishear names and technical terms, and it does not know where sentences end.
Can I get a transcript in another language?
You can pick any caption track the video actually has from the language menu. If it has none in the language you want, the track you do have can be machine-translated into English — useful, but rough enough to treat as a draft.
Does it work with Shorts?
Yes. Shorts links are recognised, as are embeds, live links and youtu.be links.
Do I need an account?
No. Single videos are free and need no sign-up.
Diagnostics — when a video will not load

Runs each retrieval method against one video and reports exactly what YouTube said. The fastest way to tell a blocked network apart from a video that simply has no captions.