Save as a file
YouTube Transcript Downloader
Get the transcript out of the browser and into a file — as plain text for reading, subtitles for a video editor, or JSON for a script.
Paste a YouTube video link
One video, or several pasted together. Duplicates are removed.
Press Ctrl + Enter to fetch
Nothing processed yet
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.
Which format should you pick?
Plain text (.txt)
The transcript as readable prose. Best for notes, quoting, or pasting into a summary tool.
Timestamped text (.txt)
One line per caption cue with its start time. Best when you need to find the moment something was said.
Subtitles (.srt)
The format most video editors and desktop players import. Numbered cues with start and end times.
WebVTT (.vtt)
The web standard for subtitles and captions. Use this for HTML video and most web players.
JSON (.json)
Every cue with its start time and duration. Use this when you are processing the transcript programmatically.
One video, or a whole set
Each result card has its own download menu for a single transcript. Download ZIP in the toolbar takes every transcript currently loaded and packages them as one file per video inside a single archive — which is what you want after processing a playlist or channel.
Download .txt gives you the opposite: every transcript concatenated into one document, each with its title and source URL as a header.
What exactly is in the file
The contents are the captions YouTube publishes for the video. If the video has human-written captions they are used; otherwise YouTube's automatic captions are, and the result is labelled accordingly on the card so you know which you got.
Automatic captions can mishear names and specialist vocabulary, and they do not mark sentence boundaries. Check anything you plan to quote.
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.
Frequently asked questions
- What formats can I download?
- Plain text, timestamped text, SRT subtitles, WebVTT, and JSON. Five formats, all produced from the same captions so they always agree with each other.
- Can I download every transcript at once?
- Yes. Download ZIP packages the whole set as one file per video inside a single archive, in whichever format you choose.
- Can I open an SRT in a video editor?
- Yes. SRT is one of the most widely supported subtitle formats — Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut, VLC and most others import it directly.
- Do the downloaded files have timestamps?
- SRT, WebVTT, JSON and the timestamped TXT all carry timing. Plain text does not, and neither does YouTube to Text.
- Are the files free to use?
- The tool is free, but the transcript is derived from someone else's video. Copyright in the underlying content still belongs to its owner, so check before republishing.
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.