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YouTube Transcript Downloader

Pull the full transcript out of any YouTube video. Paste the link, pick a language, then read it on the page, copy it in one click, or save it as plain text, SRT or VTT with the timings intact — no account, no extension, nothing to install.

Get a transcript
Watch, youtu.be, Shorts, embed and live links

A transcript belongs to whoever made the video. Quoting, translating, studying and summarising are ordinary uses; republishing someone's transcript as your own writing is not.

How it works

Get a transcript in three steps

Paste the video link

Copy the YouTube URL from your browser or the share sheet — watch links, youtu.be links and Shorts links all work — and paste it in.

Choose a language

Every caption track the video carries is listed, with creator-written tracks shown ahead of the auto-generated ones.

Copy or download

Read the transcript on the page, copy it to the clipboard, or save it as plain text, SRT or VTT with the timings intact.

Features

What you get

Three formats

Plain text for reading and summarising, SRT for video editors, VTT for web players — all built from the same fetch.

Every available language

The languages listed are read from the video itself, with creator-written tracks ranked ahead of auto-generated ones.

Timestamps optional

Read it as clean prose, or flip on timestamps to jump back to the moment a line was said.

One-click copy

Send the whole transcript to your clipboard without downloading a file at all.

No account needed

No sign-up, no email wall, no browser extension and no bundled installer.

Works on any device

It is a web page, so it behaves the same on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS.

Background

What a transcript is actually good for

A transcript turns a video into something you can search, skim and quote. A forty-minute talk takes forty minutes to watch and about four to read, which is why researchers, students and journalists pull transcripts before deciding whether a video is worth their time at all. Finding the one sentence you half-remember is a Ctrl+F away instead of a scrub bar away.

For creators the uses are more concrete. Your own transcript is the raw material for a blog post, a newsletter, a set of Shorts captions or a description that carries the keywords people actually search for. Studying a competitor's transcript shows you how they structure a hook and how long they spend before the first payoff — structure that is very hard to hear but obvious on the page.

It is worth knowing where the text comes from. YouTube generates captions with speech recognition for most uploads, and creators can replace them with a written track. The machine version is good enough to follow but it invents punctuation, mangles proper nouns and technical vocabulary, and does not mark speaker changes — so a two-person interview arrives as one undifferentiated block. Where a creator-written track exists, it is listed first here, and it is always the better source.

If transcripts are a routine part of your workflow rather than an occasional need, the desktop route is faster. Vynex Studio is free and does its work locally, which means no queue and no one else's rate limits.

FAQ

Transcript downloader questions

What is the difference between the TXT, SRT and VTT downloads?

TXT is the spoken words as continuous text, which is what you want for reading, summarising or feeding into another tool. SRT and VTT are subtitle files: the same text split into timed cues that a video player or editor can display in sync. SRT is the format most editing software expects; VTT is the web standard used by HTML5 players.

Can I get a transcript for a video that has no captions?

No. This tool reads the caption tracks YouTube already holds for a video — it does not run speech recognition of its own. Almost every video in a widely supported language has an auto-generated track, but a video with captions disabled by its owner, or one too new for YouTube to have processed, genuinely has nothing to fetch.

Are auto-generated captions accurate enough to use?

For following along, searching for a quote or drafting a summary, generally yes. For publishing, no — auto captions have no punctuation conventions to speak of, mis-hear names and technical terms, and rarely mark who is speaking. If a video offers a creator-written track, take that one; it is listed first for exactly this reason.

Which languages can I download?

Whichever the video actually carries. The language list is read from the video itself rather than promised in advance, so what you see offered is what genuinely exists — often one creator-written track plus an auto-generated one in the spoken language.

Does it work with YouTube Shorts?

Yes. Shorts links are recognised alongside standard watch links, youtu.be short links, embed URLs and live URLs.

Do I need an account or an extension?

Neither. It runs in your browser with no sign-up, no email wall and nothing to install.

Can I use a transcript however I like?

A transcript is the video's spoken content, so the video owner's copyright applies to it just as it applies to the video. Quoting, studying, translating for your own use and similar uses are usually fine; republishing a whole transcript as if it were your own writing is not. Use it the way you would use any other source.

Why did my link fail with "private, age-restricted or region-locked"?

Those three cases cannot be read: private videos need an account with access, age-restricted videos need a signed-in session, and region-locked videos are unavailable from the server's location. Members-only content is blocked for the same reason.
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Vynex Studio is a free Windows app that runs these tools locally — no rate limits, plus a video downloader, thumbnail downloader, image compressor and watermark removers in the same window.

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