Free tool

YouTube transcript with timestamps

Copying a transcript out of YouTube loses the timings. Downloading it as a timed format keeps every line pinned to the second it was said.

No sign-up. No credit card. Works on channels, playlists, and single videos.

Why the timings disappear when you copy

YouTube's transcript panel shows timestamps on screen, but selecting the text and copying it gives you an unpunctuated wall of words with the timings gone or smeared into the sentences. The timings are real data on the caption track — they just do not survive a copy and paste. Downloading the track as a file keeps them.

Pick the format by what you are going to do with it

For a video editor, a player, or re-uploading captions, use SRT or VTT — both keep a start and end time per cue. For a spreadsheet or a quick scan of who said what when, CSV gives you one row per cue. For code, JSON gives you objects with numeric start and duration fields you can seek against. If you want none of that, Markdown and TXT drop the clock and give you readable prose.

Timestamps are what make a citation checkable

This is the practical reason to keep them. A quote pulled from a transcript with no timing is unverifiable — a reader has to scrub the whole video to confirm it. With cue times you can link straight to the second, which matters for research notes, journalism, and anything an AI model is going to quote back at you.

Whole channels keep their timings too

This is not a single-video tool. A channel or playlist job returns the same timed formats for every video in it, so a hundred videos can come back as a hundred SRT files, or as one document where each segment still records where it came from.

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Download a timed transcript