Export the caption track of any public YouTube video as a subtitle file — .srt for editors and players, .vtt for the web, or plain text — in under a minute, free for 25 videos a month.
Subtitle files are useful far beyond watching with the sound off. Video editors need an .srt to burn captions into a clip, translators need the original track as a starting point, accessibility teams need files they can review and fix, and researchers want cue-by-cue data with exact timings. YouTube already has all of this for nearly every video — the trick is getting it out as a file.
youtu.be links, Shorts, and live replays all work..srt, .vtt, .txt, .csv, or .json.The file lands in your downloads folder immediately. The SRT and VTT exports keep every cue's original start and end times, so they stay in sync when you load them against the video — no re-timing needed.
<track> elements and most embedded web players expect. Choose VTT if the captions are going onto a website or web app.A reasonable rule of thumb: SRT or VTT when the file goes back next to a video, TXT when a human will read it, CSV or JSON when software will.
Many videos carry several caption tracks — an author-uploaded one, auto-generated captions, and sometimes community or auto-translated tracks in other languages. The language dropdown lists everything YouTube has for that video, with auto-generated tracks clearly marked. Pick a different track and the view reloads instantly; whatever you download reflects the track you selected. Author-uploaded captions are exact, while auto-generated ones are usually solid for clear speech but worth a skim before you publish them anywhere.
If you need subtitle files for dozens or hundreds of videos — say, every episode of a series you're localizing, or a full course you're archiving — don't do it one tab at a time. Bulk extraction accepts a playlist URL, a channel @handle, a pasted list of links, or an uploaded CSV, and processes up to 50 videos per batch. You get all the files together in your chosen format instead of fifty separate trips through the same workflow.
For fully automated workflows, the REST API does the same job from code: send video URLs, get back structured transcript data you can render into any subtitle format your pipeline needs.
Honestly: not as a viewer. YouTube's Show transcript panel lets you read captions next to the player, but there is no download or export button anywhere in the viewer interface — not for SRT, not for plain text. The only people who can download caption files from YouTube itself are the video's own creators, who can export their captions through YouTube Studio. For any video you didn't upload, you need an external tool. (If reading rather than downloading is your goal, the transcript panel is covered in our guide to extracting YouTube transcripts.)
One underrated benefit of having a real file: you can fix it. SRT and VTT are plain text, so any text editor opens them — correct a misheard name, tidy the punctuation in an auto-generated track, or translate cue by cue while the timings stay intact. Most video editors also let you re-import the corrected file and burn it in. If you'd rather work in a spreadsheet, download the CSV instead, edit the text column in Sheets or Excel, and keep the start and end times untouched. Starting from YouTube's existing track is almost always faster than transcribing and timing captions from scratch.
Yes — SRT, VTT, CSV, and JSON exports preserve the exact cue timings from YouTube's caption track, so the file lines up with the video without adjustment.
If the creator disabled captions and YouTube never auto-generated any, there's no track to download — you'll get a clear message rather than an empty file, and the attempt doesn't count against your quota.
25 videos per month, no account required, in every format. Paid plans raise that to as much as 10,000 per month and include bulk and API access.