Free YouTube Transcript Downloader

Every format you need

SRT and VTT are timestamped subtitle formats for captions and video editors. TXT is the clean full transcript. JSONkeeps every timestamped segment — ideal for feeding a video's content to an AI agent or LLM.

Which format for which job

Editing the video: take SRT. Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut and CapCut all import it directly, and it's what YouTube, LinkedIn and most upload flows expect when you attach a subtitle file to a re-upload. Putting the video on your own site: take VTT— it's the format the HTML5 <track> element reads, and the only one browsers accept natively.

Reading or quoting rather than editing: TXT strips every timestamp and gives you clean prose to search or paste into a doc. Building something on top of it: JSON keeps each segment with its start and end time, so you can jump a player to a phrase, chunk the video for a RAG index, or line the text up against your own analysis. Already have a file in the wrong one? The VTT ↔ SRT converter rewrites it in your browser without uploading it anywhere.

Downloader or generator?

They read the same caption track, and which one you want depends on what happens next. This page is the file job: timestamps intact, subtitle formats, something an editor or a player consumes. The transcript generator is the text job: one clean block with a copy button, shaped for pasting into ChatGPT or Claude to summarise. Same source, different output — if you want a subtitle file, stay here.

Want the whole channel?

This tool pulls one video. Channel X-Ray pulls every transcript on a channel, plus every comment classified into what the audience wants and an agent-ready soul pack — one report, pay once.

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