YouTube Transcript Downloader
YouTubePaste a YouTube link and download its captions as plain text or SRT subtitles, when the video has captions available. Useful for notes, translations and editing your own videos.
Only use A2Z Video Tools with content you own, content in the public domain, or content you have permission to download, save, convert or use. Users are responsible for complying with applicable laws and the terms of the source platform.
What this does
When a YouTube video has captions, this tool fetches them and offers two downloads: plain text for reading, quoting or feeding to a translator, and an SRT subtitle file with timings for use in an editor. Creator-provided captions are preferred when they exist, because auto-generated ones mishear names and technical terms.
When it will not work, honestly
Two cases. First, not every video has captions at all: the uploader can disable them, and very new or very quiet videos may have none. Second, YouTube sometimes refuses caption requests coming from hosted servers like the one behind this site. When that happens the tool says so plainly rather than pretending the video is at fault, and the refusal usually clears on its own after a while.
What a transcript is for
Notes from a lecture or tutorial, quoting a talk accurately, translating your own video into another language, or getting a clean starting point for editing your own captions rather than typing from scratch. The text of a video is the creator's work: quoting is normal, republishing someone else's transcript wholesale as your own content is not.
About the SRT file
The SRT keeps YouTube's own timing, so it can be dropped straight into an editor or player as subtitles. If the captions were auto-generated the timings are good but the words deserve a read-through, since automatic recognition guesses confidently and wrongly in equal measure.