Download subtitles from any YouTube video
Every caption track the video carries, in whichever language you need, as a file you can keep.
Works with youtube.com/watch, youtu.be, Shorts, Live and embed links — or a bare video ID.
Seeing what a video actually has
Paste a link and the language picker fills with every caption track that video offers — often just one, occasionally thirty or more. Each is labelled so you can tell a human-written track from a machine-generated one, which matters more than people expect.
Most tools quietly grab whichever track happens to be first and never tell you the others existed. If a video has both a rough auto-generated English track and a proper one the creator wrote, you want to know.
Choosing a format
| Format | Reach for it when |
|---|---|
| SRT | Importing into a video editor, or uploading subtitles back to a platform |
| WebVTT | Subtitling HTML5 video on a website |
| Plain text | Reading, quoting or pasting into a document |
| Timestamped text | Referencing specific moments without needing a subtitle file |
| Markdown | Filing into notes, with the title and source link already attached |
| JSON / CSV | Processing the cues programmatically or in a spreadsheet |
Captions, subtitles, transcripts
Used interchangeably in practice, but they aren't quite the same thing. Captionsare timed text in the spoken language, originally for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers, and may note sounds as well as speech. Subtitles are timed text in another language, for people who can hear but don't speak it. A transcript is the whole thing as a document, with or without timings.
YouTube stores all of them in the same underlying caption tracks, which is why one tool covers all three.
What you can reasonably do with them
Captions are part of the creator's work and copyright applies to them as it does to the video. Quoting, studying, translating for your own use, and accessibility are all ordinary uses. Republishing an entire transcript as your own content is not. The tool doesn't police this — but it's worth being straight that the line exists.
Common questions
Why does this video only have one language when others have thirty?
It's entirely up to the creator. YouTube auto-generates a track in the spoken language for most videos, and everything beyond that has to be added deliberately — either by the creator, or historically through community contributions. Large channels often have many; most videos have one.
What's the difference between the auto tracks and the others?
Auto-generated tracks come from speech recognition: no punctuation, no speaker labels, and unreliable on names and jargon. Tracks without the "auto" marker were written or checked by a person and are usually far better. The picker labels each one.
Can I download every language at once?
Not in one click — pick a language, download, then switch and download again. Each switch refetches that specific track.
Can I get subtitles for a private or members-only video?
No. If the video isn't publicly viewable while signed out, its captions aren't reachable either.
Are translated tracks any good?
Ones the creator uploaded are usually solid. Machine-translated tracks — especially a machine translation of an auto-generated transcript — compound two lots of errors, so read them with suspicion.