YouTube Transcript (via yt-dlp)
Fetch a YouTube video's captions (no video download) and save a clean raw .txt transcript.
Save location
- If the user is in a real project/working dir → save there.
- Otherwise (no dir given, or cwd makes no sense) → save to
~/Downloads.
Fastest path
bashOUT="$(pwd)" # or ~/Downloads if cwd makes no sense META=$(yt-dlp --print "%(channel)s|%(title)s" --skip-download "URL") NAME=$(echo "$META" | tr '| ' '__' | tr -cd '[:alnum:]_.-') # "Channel_Title", spaces -> _, strip unsafe chars yt-dlp --skip-download --write-subs --write-auto-subs \ --sub-langs "en.*" --sub-format json3 \ -o "$OUT/$NAME.%(ext)s" "URL"
Always name the file Channel_Title with spaces replaced by _ (e.g. David_Ondrej_title_of_video.txt). Fall back channel → uploader → uploader_id if channel is null.
--skip-download= captions only.--write-subs+--write-auto-subs= manual first, auto as fallback (yt-dlp prefers manual automatically).- Always use
json3, never VTT/SRT — auto VTT repeats every line twice (rolling captions). json3 is clean structured JSON.
Flatten json3 → raw text
bashpython3 - "$OUT" <<'PY' import json, html, re, glob, sys, pathlib f = glob.glob(sys.argv[1] + "/*.json3") if not f: sys.exit("no json3 file") data = json.load(open(f[0], encoding="utf-8")) parts = ["".join(s.get("utf8","") for s in e.get("segs") or []) for e in data.get("events", [])] txt = re.sub(r"\s+", " ", html.unescape(" ".join(p.strip() for p in parts if p.strip()))).strip() out = pathlib.Path(f[0]).with_suffix(".txt") out.write_text(txt, encoding="utf-8"); print(out) PY
Output: <video_id>.txt in the chosen dir. Report the path; print the text if short.
Notes
- Non-English / unknown language: run
yt-dlp --list-subs "URL"first, then set--sub-langs. - Newer yt-dlp may need
denoon PATH for YouTube extraction.
Failure handling
- On first failure: run
yt-dlp -Uonce, retry once, then stop. - 429 / "Sign in to confirm you're not a bot" = IP flagged. STOP — do NOT retry in a loop (makes it worse).
- Empty / "no subtitles" = video has no captions. Report it; don't retry, don't switch tools.
- Never fall back to downloading audio for Whisper unless the user explicitly asks.
