Download the transcript of a YouTube video

A plain .txt file with the full text of the video, saved from the side panel in one click. No email gate, no watermark, no zip archive with three files you did not ask for.

Paste a link to check the video, then grab the file from the panel.

What lands in the file

A YouTube transcript download here is one file: plain .txt, UTF-8, the whole thing in reading order.

Timestamps are optional. Turn them off before you download when the text is going into an article or a prompt, and leave them on when you need to point a colleague at the exact second. Nothing else gets added: no header, no advert line, no "generated by" footer that you then have to delete in every file.

Plain text is a deliberate choice. It opens in anything, it diffs cleanly, it pastes into ChatGPT without markup noise, and it costs a fraction of a document format for a two-hour podcast.

Download, or just copy

Two different jobs, and it is worth picking the right one.

Copy when the text is going somewhere immediately: a note, a draft, a chat window. Clipboard, one click, done.
Download when the words have to outlive the tab: an archive of a source, a batch you will process later, evidence you may need to cite in six months.

Journalists tend to download, because a saved file with a timestamp is a source you can go back to after the video gets edited or pulled. That happens more often than you would think.

Transcript file or subtitle file

People search for both and mean different things. A transcript is text for reading. A subtitle file is text plus timing, meant to be fed back into a player or an editor.

Which format fits which job
Format	Good for	Do we export it
.txt	Reading, notes, quotes, feeding an LLM	Yes
.srt	Burning subtitles in a video editor	No
.vtt	Captions for web players	No
Clipboard	Pasting right now	Yes

If SRT is what you came for, a subtitle downloader is the correct tool and this is not it. For everything that ends up in a document, .txt is the format that causes the fewest problems.

Limits worth knowing before you start a big batch

Eighty transcripts a day, reset at midnight UTC. That is generous for research and deliberately awkward for scraping a whole channel. There is no paid tier that lifts it, because there is no paid tier.

You download YouTube transcript files one video at a time, from the video page. If your workflow is a spreadsheet of 400 URLs, be honest with yourself: an extension is the wrong shape for that job, and an API is the right one.

Related: generate a transcript first if you just want to read it, or convert the video to text when the destination is a document.

FAQ

Download questions

How do I download a YouTube transcript for free?

Install the extension, open the video, click the icon, then press Download. A .txt file with the full transcript lands in your downloads folder. No account and no email are involved at any point.

Can I download the transcript with timestamps?

Yes, and you can leave them out. The toggle sits in the panel before you export, so the same video gives you a clean reading copy or a timestamped reference copy depending on what you need.

What file format is the transcript?

Plain .txt in UTF-8. It opens anywhere and pastes cleanly into Notion, Obsidian, Google Docs or a chat window. SRT and VTT subtitle files are not exported.

Can I download transcripts in bulk?

Not in one action. Downloads are per video, and the daily cap is 80 transcripts. For hundreds of videos at once, an extension is the wrong instrument, use an API.

Is downloading a YouTube transcript allowed?

You are reading caption data YouTube serves to your own browser, which is fine for personal research, notes and quoting with attribution. Republishing a full transcript as your own content is a different question, and that one is on you.

Why does the download button return nothing?

Because that video has no caption track. The uploader turned captions off and automatic captioning never produced one. There is no file to save in that case.

Save the next transcript straight to your downloads folder

Free, no sign-up, and the file is yours to do anything with.

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