Video Transcript Downloader

Video Transcript Downloader

Attribution: Sourced from steipete/agent-scripts by Peter Steinberger.

When to Use

• Downloading video, audio, or subtitle tracks from YouTube and other platforms
• Extracting transcripts or captions for content analysis
• Clipping segments or downloading playlists via yt-dlp

Download and extract transcripts/video/audio from YouTube and other video platforms using yt-dlp.

Capabilities

• Print a transcript as a clean paragraph (timestamps optional).
• Download video/audio/subtitles.

Transcript behavior:

• YouTube: fetch via youtube-transcript-plus when possible.
• Otherwise: pull subtitles via yt-dlp, then clean into a paragraph.

Transcript

# Clean paragraph transcript (default)
yt-dlp --write-auto-subs --skip-download --sub-format vtt --sub-langs en URL
# Or use yt-dlp subtitles

# With timestamps
yt-dlp --write-auto-subs --skip-download --convert-subs srt --sub-langs en URL

Download Video / Audio / Subtitles

# Video
yt-dlp URL -o '%(title)s.%(ext)s'

# Audio only
yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 URL

# Subtitles
yt-dlp --write-subs --skip-download --sub-langs en URL

# List available formats
yt-dlp -F URL

# Download specific format
yt-dlp -f 137+140 URL

# Prefer MP4 without re-encoding
yt-dlp --remux-video mp4 URL

Notes

• Default transcript output is a single paragraph. Use timestamp-preserving formats only when asked.
• Bracketed cues like [Music] appear in auto-generated subtitles; filter with sed or grep -v '^\[' .
• For playlists: yt-dlp --yes-playlist URL

Troubleshooting

# Install dependencies
brew install yt-dlp ffmpeg

# Verify
yt-dlp --version
ffmpeg -version | head -n 1