Three steps to download YouTube subtitles: paste the URL, click Transcribe, choose SRT, VTT, or TXT. No browser extension, no install, no signup.
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...”
YouTube doesn't expose a download button for subtitles, but the data is reachable through the video page itself. The standard manual workaround is the three-dot menu under the video → Show transcript → copy and paste into a text editor — slow, lossy, and the result is plain text with no timings at all. The faster path is a URL-based downloader that reads the caption track directly. Paste any YouTube URL above and the tool returns three downloadable files: SRT (.srt) — the universal subtitle format every video editor accepts; WebVTT (.vtt) — the W3C standard required for HTML5 video on a webpage; and plain text (.txt) — the timing-free version for reading and repurposing. Typical videos finish in 10–30 seconds. One thing worth being straight about: this tool reads the caption track the video already has, and does not re-listen to the audio. That is a feature almost all of the time — creator-uploaded captions are human-written and get names and jargon right, and the timings come along for free — but it means a video with no caption track at all has nothing to export.
One run produces all three formats. Picking correctly the first time saves a conversion step later.
SRT (.srt) — numbered cues, comma-decimal timestamps, blank line between entries. This is the safe default: Premiere Pro, Final Cut, DaVinci Resolve, CapCut, VLC, Vimeo, and the subtitle uploaders on LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube all accept it.
1
00:00:01,360 --> 00:00:03,040
Welcome back to the channel
2
00:00:03,120 --> 00:00:06,480
Today we're covering three thingsWebVTT (.vtt) — the same cues with period-decimal timestamps and a WEBVTT header line. Use this one for the web: an HTML5 caption track element requires VTT specifically, and an SRT handed to it will silently fail to load.
WEBVTT
1
00:00:01.360 --> 00:00:03.040
Welcome back to the channelPlain text (.txt) — the spoken words with no cue numbers and no timings, for reading, quoting, drafting, and pasting into an LLM.
Quick rule: editing video → SRT, publishing to the web → VTT, writing → TXT.
This tool is not the right answer for every case. Here is the full landscape, including when to use something else.
If you uploaded the video, Studio gives you the caption file directly: Subtitles → select the language → download. It is free, official, and lossless. Use it. No third-party tool beats it for your own content, and nothing here applies.
Under any video: the three-dot menu → Show transcript. You can read along and copy the text out. What you cannot get is a timed file — copying the panel yields words with, at best, ragged inline timecodes that no editor will parse. Fine for a quick quote, useless for subtitling.
Paste a link, get SRT/VTT/TXT. No install, no extension permissions, works on any device including iPad and Chromebook. The trade-off is the free-tier ceiling below, and the requirement that a caption track exists.
Convenient once installed and they sit right on the video page. The costs are real though: they only work in the browser they are installed in, they break whenever YouTube changes its page markup, and a caption extension by definition requests permission to read the pages you visit. That is a meaningful privacy trade for an occasional task.
Utilities like yt-dlp will pull caption tracks in bulk and are genuinely the best option for archiving hundreds of videos or scripting a pipeline. They require a terminal and a Python install, which puts them out of reach for most people who just need one file today.
A downloaded SRT is plain text, so fixing it needs no special software. Open it in Notepad, TextEdit, or VS Code and you will see the four-line block structure: cue number, timecode line, subtitle text, blank line.
Fixing words is safe — edit the text line and save. Automatic captions reliably mangle proper nouns, product names, and technical jargon, and a two-minute pass over those is usually all a file needs before it is publishable.
Shifting timings takes more care. Every timecode line uses HH:MM:SS,mmm and both the start and the end must move together, so a bulk offset is a job for a subtitle editor rather than find-and-replace. Aegisub and Subtitle Edit are both free and give you a waveform view for this; VLC can also nudge subtitle sync live while you preview.
Re-uploading: in YouTube Studio, Subtitles → Add language → Upload file → With timing. Keep the .srt extension and UTF-8 encoding, and non-English characters will survive intact.
Translating: feed the SRT to DeepL, Google Translate, or an LLM and ask it to translate only the text lines and leave the cue numbers and timecodes untouched. The timings stay valid because the words changed but the structure did not.
Paste the YouTube URL into the field above and click Transcribe. When the result loads, click Download and choose SRT, VTT, or TXT format. The whole flow takes under a minute.
YouTube shows captions for watching but has never offered a download for videos you don't own — the transcript panel is read-only by design. The caption track itself is still served to the video page in order to be displayed, which is what a URL-based downloader reads and converts into a subtitle file. For your own uploads you don't need any of this: YouTube Studio → Subtitles → download hands you the file directly.
Then there is nothing to download, and you'll get an error rather than an invented transcript. This tool reads the caption track a video already has — it does not re-listen to the audio, so it can't manufacture subtitles for a video that has none. In practice most public videos with clear speech carry at least an automatic track; the real exceptions are pure-music videos, very short clips, and uploads where the creator disabled captions.
When YouTube has multiple caption tracks (e.g., creator-uploaded English plus auto-translated Spanish), the tool downloads the primary caption track. For other languages, take the SRT and translate it via DeepL, Google Translate, or ChatGPT.
10-30 seconds for a typical video — the bottleneck is fetching and parsing the caption track, not writing the file, so length matters less than you'd expect. Note the free tier only accepts videos up to 10 minutes; longer videos are rejected with a clear message, and full-length lectures or podcast episodes need Pro.
No. The tool only works on publicly accessible YouTube videos. Private and unlisted videos require ownership or sharing permissions the tool doesn't have.
Yes. SRT and VTT files are plain text — open them in any text editor (Notepad, TextEdit, VS Code), edit the text or timing, and save. Specialised subtitle editors like Aegisub or Subtitle Edit are recommended for heavy editing.
Yes. Paste any YouTube Shorts URL (with /shorts/ in the path) and get the same SRT/VTT/TXT downloads. Shorts have automatic captions on virtually all videos in 2026.
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