Download closed captions (CC) from any YouTube video. Pick SRT for editors, VTT for HTML5 web, or plain text. Free for 2 videos per session.
Real transcript + AI summary, ready in seconds.
“So today I want to talk about the three biggest mistakes people make when trying to grow on TikTok. And I see this constantly — creators spending hours on production value when what actually drives growth is the hook. The first fifteen seconds. That’s it.”
“If you don’t have them in the first fifteen seconds, they’re gone. So let me walk you through exactly what I changed — and how it took my average view duration from twenty-two percent all the way up to sixty-eight...”
Watching captions inside the YouTube player works for the moment — but the moment a caption track exists outside YouTube, it becomes useful in dozens of new ways. A downloaded SRT file imports directly into Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, and DaVinci Resolve as a captions track on a re-edited cut of the video. A WebVTT file embeds in your own HTML5 video on a webpage you control, with the W3C-standard <track> element. A plain text version becomes the source for translation, an SEO blog post, a searchable archive entry, an accessibility audit document, or a transcript shared with someone who can't watch video at all. The download flow on this page handles all three formats from the same URL paste. The caption fetch reads YouTube's official caption track when one exists — preserving any speaker IDs, music notations, and sound effects the creator added — and falls back to AI speech recognition only when the video has no creator-uploaded captions. The whole flow takes 10-30 seconds. No browser extension, no software install, no upload of the video file (which would take orders of magnitude longer than the URL fetch).
Yes. The tool works in any mobile browser — Safari on iOS, Chrome on Android. The downloaded file goes to your phone's Files / Downloads. From there you can email it, AirDrop it, or open it in any text editor app.
There's no hard cap on the tool side. YouTube videos up to 4-5 hours work reliably. Longer livestream replays (8+ hours) sometimes time out — break them into segments by passing only a section URL with a start parameter.
Two possible causes. (1) The source caption track on YouTube has those gaps — auto-generated captions sometimes drop low-volume speech or background dialogue. Try downloading from a video with creator-uploaded captions instead. (2) Network interruption during the fetch. Re-run the download.
Yes. SRT is the universal format Adobe Premiere imports natively. Drag the .srt file onto your timeline or use File → Import. Premiere creates a Captions track from the SRT timestamps.
Captions are independent of video resolution. The same SRT/VTT/TXT file works whether the source video is 144p or 4K. Resolution affects the video stream, not the caption track.
No. The tool works without YouTube authentication. As long as the video is publicly accessible (not private, not age-restricted, not member-only), the captions can be downloaded.
Open the video on YouTube and look for the CC button at the bottom of the player. If CC is selectable, captions exist. If CC is greyed out, the video has no captions — the tool will then fall back to AI speech recognition on the audio.
Yes. SRT and VTT are plain text, editable in any text editor. For visual editing with audio playback, use Aegisub (free, all platforms) or Subtitle Edit (free, Windows). Most edits are: fixing proper nouns, adjusting timing, splitting overly-long caption blocks.
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