YouTube Transcript Downloader: Copy or Save Any Video Text

How to Get YouTube Transcript Text in Four Steps

Open the video on a laptop, not a 6-inch phone
The transcript opens in the YouTube app for Android and iPhone too, below the video description. A phone is still the wrong tool for a 40-minute lecture. Holding a selection across 600 lines on a touch screen, while the page keeps loading more of them under your finger, almost never works. Open the video in Chrome or Edge in a desktop browser instead.
Click More, then Show transcript
Under the player, open the ... menu, labeled More on a wide window, and choose Show transcript. On some layouts YouTube keeps that command out of the menu. Expand the description with ...more and look for the same button at the bottom of it, under the tags. Either way a panel opens to the right of the player, one short line per caption, running from 0:00 to the last second of the video. If the button is in neither place, the video has no caption track at all, neither an uploaded .srt nor an automatic transcript.
Turn timestamps off and copy the text
The panel has its own ... menu with Toggle timestamps, which drops the 0:00:14 column and leaves readable prose. Drag from the 0:00 line to the last one and press Ctrl+C. That is the whole export, and YouTube writes no file at all, so what you end up with is whatever the clipboard holds.
Save the whole thing with one click
On a 90-minute conference talk the panel runs past 1,000 lines, and one careless drag loses half of them. Our free YouTube Video to Text Converter extension sits in the same tab and takes all 1,000 of them at once. One click is enough to download YouTube captions as clean text, or as an .srt file with every timecode kept.

Where the Manual Method Runs Out

For a 3-minute clip, Show transcript plus Ctrl+C is the entire job. A 70-minute podcast episode is another matter, because the panel keeps pulling in lines as you scroll and the selection dies every time it does. Automatic captions from YouTube add work of their own. Punctuation lands where it wants, and product names such as Photoshop or Lightroom come back misspelled often enough that 10 minutes of cleanup follow before the text goes into a document. A panel you have to keep open on screen is not an export in the sense that Word or Notepad means it.

What a Free YouTube Transcript Generator Adds

YouTube Video to Text Converter runs inside the YouTube tab you already have open. 4 things the Show transcript panel cannot do.

Download YouTube captions in one click, without selecting a single line by hand.
Save plain .txt without timecodes, or .srt with them.
Take the Spanish or German track when the channel has published one.
No account, no sign-in, no cap at 5 videos a day.

Add to Chrome

Clean text, no timecodes

As a YouTube transcript generator it writes prose you can paste straight into Word or into a chat prompt. The 0:00:14 marker every second line is gone, and sentences are no longer chopped in half at the line break.

SRT From a YouTube Subtitle Downloader

Editors and translators need the timing back, which is exactly what the .srt output keeps. Subtitle Edit and Premiere Pro open the file with no conversion step in between.

Subtitles in other languages

Plenty of channels publish captions in English plus 2 or 3 more languages. When the video carries such a track, you can download subtitles from YouTube in that language and not only in the one the panel shows by default.

Nothing leaves the browser tab

Chrome already holds the captions in memory before you click anything, so the text is taken from there. A YouTube link to transcript site works the other way round. You hand over the address, and a server you have never seen fetches the video. Here nothing is uploaded, and no YouTube address is pasted into a third-party site.

Who Needs a YouTube Transcript Extractor

Students and researchers

A 2-hour lecture is faster to read than to rewatch, and a .txt file answers Ctrl+F for the one term you actually came for.

Writers and marketers

Turning a 45-minute webinar into an article starts with the words on the page. If what you have is a subtitle file rather than plain text, strip the timings out of the SRT first and work from the clean paragraphs.

Channel owners

Reading your own automatic captions is the quickest way to see how badly YouTube mangles product names and surnames. Fix them in YouTube Studio under Subtitles, then upload the corrected .srt track.

🙋 Frequently Asked Questions

❓ How can I download a transcript of a YouTube video?

YouTube has no download button, only a panel you can copy from. Open the video in Chrome on a computer, click the ... or More menu under the player and pick Show transcript. Step 2 above covers the layouts where that command hides. Switch the timestamps off, drag over the lines and press Ctrl+C. For a file instead of a clipboard, step 4 covers the extension.

❓ Is there a free way to download YouTube transcripts?

Yes, 2 of them, and neither costs anything. The Show transcript panel is part of YouTube itself. Our Chrome extension is free as well. Install it from the Chrome Web Store and it works on the next video you open, without a sign-in step, and it will download YouTube captions from the tenth video of the day exactly as it did from the first.

❓ How do I copy the transcript of a whole video, not just a part?

The panel holds everything from 0:00 to the last second, but it loads in chunks as you scroll. To copy it all by hand, scroll all the way down first and only then start the selection at the top, because the selection breaks the moment the page pulls in the next 200 lines. The extension takes all 1,000-plus lines in a single click instead.

❓ How do I get YouTube transcripts for videos on my own channel?

As a viewer, the same way as with anyone else's video, through Show transcript. As the owner you also have YouTube Studio, where the Subtitles section lists every video and opens its caption track for editing. Check the automatic track in Studio before it goes public, because names are what it gets wrong most often.

❓ How do I download subtitles from YouTube as an SRT file?

A YouTube subtitle downloader has to run inside the YouTube tab, and our extension writes .srt straight from the lines the panel is showing. To download subtitles from YouTube in another language, pick that track in the extension before you save. There is no paste field on this page, because a page on our site cannot reach into a youtube.com tab and read anything out of it. If your player wants WebVTT, convert the SRT file afterwards.

❓ How do I extract the transcript of any YouTube video?

Any video that has captions, the author's own or the automatic ones. A YouTube transcript extractor reads a caption track, it cannot invent one. If Show transcript is missing from the menu and from the description as well, that video has no track and there is nothing to read. The audio then has to be recognized from scratch, and that is a job for our Windows program that turns local recordings into text, which walks through a folder of .mp4 files in one batch.

YouTube Transcript Downloader