Get the complete caption track of a YouTube video as text you can keep.
Your captions, out of the player
Captions do quiet, essential work: they make videos watchable in a loud gym, a silent office, and for millions of viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing. But on YouTube the caption track is locked inside the player. You can toggle it on, and that is all. This page gets the track out, as honest plain text with every line timed, free to read, copy and download.
It handles both kinds of track: closed captions carefully uploaded by the creator and the automatic ones YouTube generates when nobody bothered. The page always tells you what language the track is in, so you know what you have before you save it.
Why people download caption tracks
Creators download their own auto captions, fix the recognition errors, and upload the corrected file back, which improves both accessibility and search ranking on YouTube itself. Researchers collect caption text as data. Compliance teams archive what was said in published videos. Viewers save captions from language-learning channels to review vocabulary later. The common thread: text is only useful once you can hold onto it.
After the download, our free converters turn the text into SRT or VTT without your file ever leaving the browser. And if you need captions summarized, translated into another language, exported as a formatted PDF or fetched for an entire playlist, the Telegram buttons under every result take the same video straight to our bot.
How it works
Paste the YouTube link into the field above.
Press Get captions to load the full caption track with timing.
Copy the text or download it as a .txt file, free and without registration.
Need more than text? Our Telegram bot summarizes, translates, exports PDF and processes videos in bulk.
Paste the video link on this page and press Get captions. The whole caption track appears as text with timestamps, and one click saves it as a .txt file. No account and no software needed.
What is the difference between captions and subtitles?
Captions transcribe the audio for viewers who cannot hear it and may include sound cues. Subtitles translate or transcribe dialogue for viewers who do not speak the language. On YouTube the two share one caption track, which is exactly what this page downloads.
Can I download closed captions (CC) from any video?
From any public video that has them. If the CC badge shows on the player, the track exists and this tool can fetch it. Private videos and videos with captions disabled by the creator will return a no-captions message.
Are auto captions the same as the real captions?
No. Auto captions are generated by speech recognition and can garble names, jargon and accents. Creator-uploaded captions are usually word-perfect. This tool fetches whichever track the video actually has.
Can I fix or edit the captions after downloading?
Yes, the download is plain text, so any editor works. A common workflow is to download captions here, clean them up, then convert to SRT with our free TXT to SRT converter and re-upload to your own video.