Do this by making a GET request of the following form:Įdit Nov. This is the same link you get from the network inspector method above. Here’s how:įirst, use get_video_info to obtain a link to the subtitles in XML. After digging through their code and the function’s response, I was able to get it working in Swift. A few others have built libraries that use it, for example in python and javascript.

But what if you want to download the XML programmatically, without manually visiting each video page?Īs it turns out, there is an undocumented API function that can do this for us: get_video_info.

And as others have shown, you can get the XML transcript directly from this page by using the developer tools to inspect the network activity. On any video that has captions ( example), you can view the entire transcript by clicking the 3 dots in the description followed by “open transcript”. Or if they want others to be able to do this, they must choose to enable third-party contributions, which most video owners do not.īut the captions themselves are still public. What I believe this means is that the captions method is only intended for video owners to download & modify their own captions. The request might not be properly authorized, or the video order might not have enabled third-party contributions for this caption.” “The permissions associated with the request are not sufficient to download the caption track. Why? If you scroll all the way down to errors on that documentation page, you’ll see: The method’s description doesn’t say this, but once you actually get the required OAuth working for this function, most videos will give back a 403 “forbidden” error. Good thing the YouTube API has a captions method, right? Easy, right? So this meant I’d need to download the captions for each video that comes back as a search result. To do this, we can use video captions, as YouTube automatically generates captions by default for most videos, and these are timestamped to align with the video’s narration. To make video search a little easier, I wanted to be able to locate moments within videos that are relevant to the user’s search query. How to download public YouTube captions in XMLįor my recent research project, I used the YouTube Data API to build a tool (for MacOS using Swift) that searches for YouTube videos.

Youtube caption downloader