YouTube Transcript Downloader
Paste a link and get the whole transcript — searchable, in paragraphs you can actually read, and downloadable as TXT, SRT or VTT. No account, no limit.
Paste a link above and the transcript appears here.
Runs entirely in this browser. Nothing you type is uploaded, stored or seen by us.
Three steps, no account.
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01
Paste the link
The full address or just the eleven-character video id. Both work.
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02
Read it, or search it
Reading view joins the caption fragments into paragraphs at the natural pauses. Timed lines keeps them as captions. The search box filters either.
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03
Copy or download
Copy with or without timestamps, or download as .txt for reading, .srt for editing, .vtt for the web.
YouTube has a transcript panel already, and almost nobody uses it twice. It strips the timestamps the moment you copy, it cannot be searched, and it hands you four-word caption fragments in a narrow strip beside the video. This is the same captions, reformatted into something you can work with.
The captions come from YouTube itself, which is worth knowing for two reasons: it is instant, and it is exactly as accurate as whatever track the creator has. Where a video only has automatic captions the text arrives with no punctuation and no speaker breaks — this says so up front, before you build subtitles out of it.
YouTube Transcript Downloader, answered.
No, and there is no daily limit. It reads captions the video already has, so it costs nothing to run.
Because that video only has automatic captions, which YouTube generates without any. The tool tells you when this is the case, so you know before you use the text for subtitles rather than after.
Not here. Some tools transcribe the audio themselves, which is a paid operation whoever is doing it. This reads what exists — instantly and for nothing — and says plainly when there is nothing to read.
SRT is the older subtitle format most video editors expect. VTT is the web standard, used by the HTML5 video player. TXT is neither — it is just the words, for reading or pasting.
Yes. Every timestamp opens the video at that second in a new tab, which is usually why somebody wanted the transcript in the first place.
The words belong to whoever made the video. Quoting, studying, searching and referencing are ordinary uses; republishing somebody else's transcript as your own content is not, and search engines treat it as thin duplicate content anyway.
This is one job. The workspace does the rest.
The free tools stay free and stay ungated. Recast is where they stop being separate tabs and start handing work to each other — a link becomes a card, an article and a week of posts without you moving anything between them.