Free tool
YouTube subtitle downloader
Save a video's subtitle track as a real file — timed SRT and VTT, or clean text with the timecodes stripped out.
Download subtitlesSubtitles, captions, CC — the same track, different words
People search for this in half a dozen ways: subtitle downloader, caption downloader, closed caption or CC extractor, subtitle grabber. They all mean the same thing on YouTube — the caption track attached to a video — and this page handles all of them. What varies is only what you want out the other end: a timed file that stays in sync with the video, or plain prose you can read and search.
Timed formats keep the clock, text formats drop it
SRT and VTT keep every cue with its start and end time, which is what you need for a video editor, a player, or re-uploading captions elsewhere. TXT and Markdown throw the timings away and give you readable paragraphs. CSV and JSON keep the timings as data, one row or object per cue, for when you are going to process it in code rather than read it.
Creator-written captions beat auto-generated ones
Many videos carry both a human-written track and YouTube's speech-recognition track. Where both exist the human one is used, because it has real punctuation, correct spelling of names, and no transcription errors. Where only the auto-generated track exists, that is what you get, and the file records which kind it was.
No extension, and it is not limited to one video
Browser extensions do this one video at a time and only for the tab you are looking at. Paste a channel or playlist URL here instead and every video's subtitles come back in one job, as a ZIP of individual files or one combined document.
What this does not do
It reads subtitle tracks that already exist on YouTube. It does not run speech recognition on videos that have captions disabled, and it does not translate — you can pick among the languages a video actually publishes, but a language nobody uploaded cannot be produced.
Questions
Can I download YouTube subtitles as SRT?
Yes. Choose SRT and every cue keeps its start and end timecode, ready for a video editor or player. VTT works the same way.
How do I download subtitles without an extension?
Paste the video URL here. Nothing is installed and nothing runs in your browser's tab, which is also why it works on a whole channel rather than only the page you have open.
Can I download auto-generated captions?
Yes, when that is the track the video has. If a video also has creator-written captions, those are used instead because they are materially more accurate.
Can I get subtitles in a different language?
You can pick any language the video actually publishes a track for. There is no machine translation — if a video has only English captions, English is what exists to download.