Download YouTube video captions as subtitles (SRT) file

Last year, YouTube introduced automatic audio transcription for videos, called Closed Captions. Powered by Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology, YouTube captions enabled people with hearing disability or non-English speakers to watch and understand videos on YouTube. Along with automatic captions, Google also enabled automatic machine translation of the same allowing videos to reach an even wider population.

Videos that have captions are marked with a red colored button that reads CC. Captions can be turned on and off by clicking on this button. Translation options and other captions settings can be accessed from the same button.

YouTube captions, however, works only when you watch the videos on YouTube. A video embedded on a website loses the captioning feature. Also videos downloaded from YouTube does not carry captions. If you have downloaded such a YouTube video and wish to download the captions you can use the YouTube Caption Downloader addon for Firefox.

youtube-caption-download

YouTube Caption Downloader adds a “Download caption” link just beneath the “Embed” button on a YouTube video page as shown above.

Click this link to download the caption as an SRT file. SRT is a subtitle file format which you can play along with the downloaded video on any subtitle supporting video player like VLC media player, GOMPlayer etc.

YouTube Caption Downloader works fine with videos that has a single caption. But when a video contains multiple captions in multiple languages, the downloader will download the caption file of only the first language.

youtube-caption-download2

In the example shown above, YouTube Caption Downloader downloaded the German caption file because it is the first language that occurs in the drop down list, even though the selected caption for the video was English.

This is a known bug. The developer promises to take care of this issue in later releases.

This Article Has 14 Comments
  1. Anonymous Reply

    I tried the YouTube Caption Downloader addon for Firefox but it didn't work.
    I have a mac, could that be the problem?
    I tried to do find for caption on the page which turned up nothing, so it didn't show up on the youtube video page.
    any ideas?
    Thanks

  2. Kaushik Patowary Reply

    Maybe. Try this one
    http://google2srt.sourceforge.net/

    Another downloading trick is described here

    http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/10/download-youtube-captions.html

  3. Anonymous Reply

    What about Dailymotion? I want to dowload those captions too.

  4. Anonymous Reply

    Do you know a way to download annotations ?

  5. subber Reply

    Hi all,
    Subber is a user generated subtitles platform which enables its users to search, share and watch specific quotes inside online videos.

    Our goals are to break language barriers, to expose content to wider audiences, to increase video distribution and to develop new means of creativity.

    With an integration of advanced technologies and friendly tools, Subber provides the accessibility for every user to add subtitles over online videos.

    And it's for free!!!
    http://www.subber.com

  6. Anonymous Reply

    Is there anyway to download closed caption from dailymotion in Windows Vista?

  7. Anonymous Reply

    I too am interested in dailymotion sub extractions…

  8. Anonymous Reply

    Same goes for me: I was looking for a CC downloader for daily motion.

    from youtube you can extract subs online in the language you choose if there is multiple choise:
    http://mike.thedt.net/ytsubs/ytsubs.php

  9. Adeilton Omena Reply

    This comment has been removed by the author.

  10. Anonymous Reply

    http://mo.dbxdb.com
    download cc at video same name;

  11. Unknown Reply

    Hi Guys, I use pretty simple utility to download CC and video from YouTube

    http://www.4kdownload.com/howto/howto-download-youtube-subtitles

  12. Unknown Reply

    I have found this web based application that will do it all, no need to install any plugin or softwares to do this: youtube subtitles download tool

  13. Unknown Reply

    The last only works if the video is 20 mins long or less.

  14. ccsubs - Download Youtube Subtitles Reply

    With ccsubs.com – Subtitles & Closed Captions Downloader for Youtube it's very quick & easy to download subtitles for youtube videos. Subtitles in all supported languages can be downloaded in many different subtitle formats.

    Try it now at ccsubs.com

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *