Video to Text Converter

Three genuinely useful free options: (1) VexaScribe gives 30 minutes free on signup — enough for one short video. Accepts files up to 5 GB (most free tools cap at 25 MB). (2) OpenAI Whisper installed locally on your computer is 100% free and unlimited, but requires Python setup. Best for sensitive internal video. (3) YouTube's auto-captions are free if you can upload the video as Unlisted — but accuracy is significantly lower than modern Whisper-based tools, especially with accents or technical terms. For repeated use, paid plans typically start at $2–$15/month depending on vendor.

Yes — and you should, in one upload. VexaScribe processes your video once and lets you export both formats: TXT or DOCX (transcript for blog posts, research, show notes) and SRT or VTT (subtitle file for YouTube, TikTok, Reels, Premiere Pro, Final Cut, DaVinci Resolve). The timestamps are the same — they're just formatted differently. Don't upload your video twice for the two formats.

No. VexaScribe (and other modern AI transcription tools — Whisper, AssemblyAI, Deepgram, Rev AI) accepts video files directly and extracts the audio track internally. The "extract audio first" advice usually comes from older online converters that only accepted audio files. With current tools, drag your MP4 / MOV / WEBM / MKV / AVI in directly.

Universal formats that always work: MP4 (H.264 or H.265 codec — most common), MOV (Apple QuickTime, iPhone/Mac screen recordings), WEBM (YouTube exports, browser recordings), MKV (high-quality archives), AVI (older Windows recordings), and WMV (older Windows formats). Not directly supported: ProRes RAW and proprietary editing codecs — export those to MP4 first using your editor's export menu. If your file plays in VLC or QuickTime, it'll work with VexaScribe.

VexaScribe accepts up to 5 GB per file — enough for roughly 2-3 hours of 1080p HD video or 4-6 hours of 720p. Most free online tools cap at 25 MB, which is only about 1-2 minutes of HD video. Otter and Notta free tiers fail on any HD video longer than ~5-10 minutes. For files larger than 5 GB, compress to 720p first (Handbrake is free) or split with ffmpeg. Audio quality matters more than video resolution for transcription — you can reduce video bitrate aggressively without hurting transcript accuracy.

Modern Whisper-based tools (including VexaScribe, AssemblyAI, Deepgram) achieve roughly 92–97% word accuracy on clear English audio per the Open ASR Leaderboard and OpenAI's published Whisper benchmarks. Accuracy is governed by AUDIO quality, not video quality — a 4K video with bad mic audio transcribes worse than a 480p video with good mic audio. Accuracy drops on: heavy accents (~85–92%), background music/noise (~80–90%), technical jargon, and overlapping speakers. Tools that claim "99.9% accuracy" are using marketing language — the actual peer-reviewed WER (word error rate) for state-of-the-art ASR is 3–8% on clean speech.

Direct YouTube URL transcription is a separate workflow. If you have a YouTube URL (yours or someone else's), use our YouTube transcription tool (or download the video first with a service like yt-dlp, then upload). VexaScribe's main video-to-text flow is for files you have locally — MP4, MOV, etc. — which is the most reliable path because YouTube's terms-of-service restrict direct URL ripping by third-party tools.

Yes. VexaScribe supports 99 languages including Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Turkish, Hindi, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Russian, and many more. The language is auto-detected from the audio, or you can specify it manually. Whisper-based engines (which we use) are especially strong on European and East Asian languages because of their training data mix. Cross-language transcription (e.g., Spanish audio → English transcript) is NOT supported — the output language matches the input language.

For most internal business video — training, town halls, all-hands, customer success calls — VexaScribe is appropriate. We don't train models on customer audio or transcripts, files are encrypted in transit and at rest, and you can delete any file at any time. For genuinely sensitive content (HR investigations with employee PII, attorney-client legal video, clinical/therapy content, executive-only strategic discussions), install OpenAI Whisper locally so the file never leaves your computer. The local-install option exists specifically for content where cloud upload would create legal risk.

Two very different things. YouTube's auto-captions use Google's older ASR engine — accuracy is roughly 60–70% on accented English and drops fast for non-English content. They're free and embedded, which is great for low-stakes use. Modern AI video transcription (VexaScribe, Whisper, AssemblyAI) uses transformer-based models trained on hundreds of thousands of hours of audio — accuracy is 92–97% on clean English, with speaker labels, professional formatting, and export to TXT/DOCX/SRT/VTT. If your video is for publishing, business, or research use, modern AI transcription is dramatically more usable than YouTube auto-captions.