Does every YouTube video have a transcript?

No. A transcript exists only for videos with captions, whether human-written or automatic, and an owner can turn them off. Many music videos and short videos have none at all.

SRT is a subtitle format holding a sequence number, a time range and the text, and nearly every video editor and media player can read it. It is the format to choose when the transcript will be used as subtitles rather than as reading material.

May I use someone else's transcript?

A transcript is a record of what someone said, and those words remain theirs. Using one privately — for notes, or to find a passage again — is reasonable; republishing it as your own writing is not.

Why did my transcript fail to load?

The two most common causes are a video with no captions, and YouTube refusing a request that came from a server. The second happens without a clear pattern and can usually be retried a little later.

Channel Analytics

YouTube Transcript Extractor

Paste a video URL to get its transcript in three formats you can use straight away.

Video URL or ID

What this is

A transcript is the text of what is spoken in a video, along with when each line appears. YouTube provides it as captions for accessibility, and for videos whose captions are public that text can be read. Its usefulness to a creator sits beyond accessibility: a transcript of your own video is raw material for descriptions, chapters, articles, short cuts, and finding your way back to a passage without rewatching.

How it works

The plain text format joins caption lines into flowing paragraphs. Captions are cut by on-screen timing rather than by meaning, so keeping those breaks makes the text harder to read than it needs to be. The timestamped and SRT formats keep the original breaks, because both exist for timing purposes.

A human-written caption track is preferred over an automatic one when both exist, and the page states which you got. The difference is real: automatic captions carry no punctuation and frequently mangle names, technical terms and numbers — precisely what matters if the transcript is going to become an article or a set of chapters.

Not every video yields a transcript. One with no captions at all obviously cannot, and requests coming from a server are sometimes refused by YouTube even when captions exist. When either happens, this page names the reason rather than showing an empty result.

How to use it

Paste the video URL Any form works, including shorts.
Choose a format Plain text, timestamped, or SRT.
Edit, then copy The box is editable before you copy or download.

Common questions

Does every YouTube video have a transcript?: No. A transcript exists only for videos with captions, whether human-written or automatic, and an owner can turn them off. Many music videos and short videos have none at all.
What is an SRT file?: SRT is a subtitle format holding a sequence number, a time range and the text, and nearly every video editor and media player can read it. It is the format to choose when the transcript will be used as subtitles rather than as reading material.
May I use someone else's transcript?: A transcript is a record of what someone said, and those words remain theirs. Using one privately — for notes, or to find a passage again — is reasonable; republishing it as your own writing is not.
Why did my transcript fail to load?: The two most common causes are a video with no captions, and YouTube refusing a request that came from a server. The second happens without a clear pattern and can usually be retried a little later.

Notes

Transcript requests are sometimes refused by YouTube — the page will say so.
The words in a transcript remain the property of whoever spoke them.