youtube-transcripts

YouTube Video Transcript Extraction

How to Get YouTube Transcripts

1. Install yt-dlp via Homebrew: brew install yt-dlp
2. Download auto-generated subtitles:

   yt-dlp --write-auto-sub --sub-lang en --skip-download --sub-format vtt -o "/tmp/video-name" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID" 2>&1

3. Clean the VTT file to readable text with Python:

   python3 -c "
   import re
   with open('/tmp/video-name.en.vtt') as f:
       lines = f.readlines()
   text_lines = []
   seen = set()
   for line in lines:
       line = line.strip()
       if not line or line.startswith('WEBVTT') or line.startswith('Kind:') or line.startswith('Language:'):
           continue
       if re.match(r'^\d{2}:\d{2}', line) or '-->' in line:
           continue
       clean = re.sub(r'<[^>]+>', '', line)
       if clean and clean not in seen:
           seen.add(clean)
           text_lines.append(clean)
   print(' '.join(text_lines))
   "

Notes

• yt-dlp is installed at /usr/local/bin/yt-dlp (Homebrew)
• Works with YouTube short URLs (youtu.be/...) and full URLs
• Auto-generated captions available on most videos
• Use --sub-lang en for English (change for other languages)
• The oEmbed API can get video title/metadata without downloading: https://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID&format=json