YouTube Subtitle Downloader: SRT, VTT, or TXT (Free, 2026)

Copy the YouTube video URL, paste it into a subtitle-downloader tool, pick your language, and choose a format (SRT, VTT, or TXT). VexaScribe's YouTube transcript tool does this free with no sign-up: it detects available caption languages, prefers creator-uploaded captions when they exist, falls back to YouTube auto-generated captions otherwise, and runs Whisper AI transcription when neither exists.

SRT (SubRip) is the most universal format — supported by video editors (Premiere, Final Cut, DaVinci Resolve), YouTube itself, and virtually every subtitle tool. VTT (WebVTT) is the W3C standard for HTML5 <video> elements — pick this for WordPress, custom web players, or modern browser-native video captions. TXT strips all timestamps and gives you plain reading text — best for research, feeding into ChatGPT/summarizers, or notes. If unsure, pick SRT.

Almost. You can download subtitles from any public video that has creator-uploaded captions or YouTube auto-generated captions. Some creators disable captions entirely; some very short Shorts or non-speech content never get auto-captions generated. When no captions exist, our tool falls back to AI transcription (Whisper) on the audio track — so you still get a downloadable file. Private and unlisted videos require sign-in to the owning account.

Typically 7–15% word error rate (WER) on clear English speech, worse on accented English, technical vocabulary, or non-English audio. For polished output, creator-uploaded captions are the better source. When creator captions aren't available, Whisper Large-v3 (what our tool falls back to) generally outperforms YouTube auto-captions on accented English and most non-English languages — see our July 2026 Whisper benchmark for language-by-language WER data.

In YouTube's CC menu, auto-generated captions are labelled explicitly, e.g. "English (auto-generated)". Creator-uploaded captions appear without the (auto-generated) suffix — just "English", "Spanish", etc. If you see multiple named languages without the auto-generated tag, the creator uploaded them. Our downloader tool prefers creator-uploaded captions when both exist.

For personal use — reading, studying, translating for your own comprehension, archiving — this is generally accepted. YouTube's Terms of Service (§5.B) prohibit automated download of "content" without permission from YouTube or the content owner; enforcement historically targets bulk video download at scale, not individual caption extraction for personal reference. Redistributing or monetizing someone else's subtitles is different — that raises copyright issues. Get permission or ensure your use qualifies as fair use / fair dealing. This is not legal advice.

Our tool handles one URL at a time. For bulk playlist or channel extraction, third-party tools like YTVidHub, DownSub, or command-line utilities (yt-dlp with --write-subs) support batch mode. Be aware that bulk automated downloading is more likely to draw YouTube ToS enforcement than single-URL personal use.

Three options: (1) Download the source-language subtitles and translate the SRT file separately with DeepL or Google Translate. (2) Use YouTube's built-in auto-translation on the source captions, then download the translated version (compounds errors from auto-caption + neural translation — fine for casual comprehension). (3) Download the plain audio and run our transcribe-and-translate workflow, which uses Whisper's translate-to-English mode for higher-quality English output.

YouTube shows captions on its player and offers download via YouTube Studio for videos you own — but there's no built-in one-click download button for viewers on public videos. Third-party tools like ours use YouTube's public timedtext endpoint to fetch the same caption data that the player uses, then format it as SRT/VTT/TXT. For videos you own, YouTube Studio > Subtitles gives you direct download in .sbv, .vtt, or .srt.

Yes, if the Short has captions. Many Shorts under 15 seconds don't have auto-captions generated. When captions are missing, our tool's Whisper fallback transcribes the audio directly. Short-form video with fast speech or heavy music tends to transcribe less accurately than standard videos — expect higher WER on Shorts.