yt-dlp Subtitles: Download YouTube Subtitles and Transcripts (Tested Commands, 2026)

yt-dlp -U

If you installed it with Homebrew or pip, update it the same way instead (brew upgrade yt-dlp or pip install -U yt-dlp). YouTube changes often, and yt-dlp releases follow.

yt-dlp --list-subs --skip-download "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arj7oStGLkU"

The end of the output for the TED talk, one line per language and the formats on offer:

es       Spanish               vtt, srt, ttml, srv3, srv2, srv1, json3
sv       Swedish               vtt, srt, ttml, srv3, srv2, srv1, json3
vi       Vietnamese            vtt, srt, ttml, srv3, srv2, srv1, json3

Copy the language code exactly. In our benchmark a request for es missed a track coded es-ES, and yt-dlp exited without an error and without a file.

yt-dlp --skip-download --write-subs --sub-langs en --sub-format srt -o "%(id)s" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arj7oStGLkU"

This wrote arj7oStGLkU.en.srt (23 KB). The first lines:

1
00:00:12,645 --> 00:00:14,015
So in college,

2
00:00:15,349 --> 00:00:16,913
I was a government major,

--skip-download keeps the video itself off your disk. -o "%(id)s" names the file after the video ID instead of its title, which is easier in scripts. Use --sub-langs en,es for several languages.

yt-dlp --skip-download --write-auto-subs --sub-langs en --convert-subs srt "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID"

YouTube serves automatic captions as VTT, so yt-dlp downloads that and converts it. Conversion needs ffmpeg installed. Expect some clean-up: our converted file opened with a [Music] cue and a 10-millisecond cue holding only a space, which is normal for automatic captions.

Passing both --write-subs and --write-auto-subs, as in the command at the top, gets you a file whether or not the creator uploaded subtitles.

yt-dlp has no plain-text output. This removes the cue numbers, timestamps and blank lines:

sed -e '/-->/d' -e '/^[0-9]*$/d' -e '/^[[:space:]]*$/d' arj7oStGLkU.en.srt > transcript.txt

On the TED talk it left 450 lines starting "So in college, / I was a government major,". Lines still break where the subtitles did; join them if you need paragraphs.

• Old versions: fail with Requested format is not available. Update.
• Language codes: must match exactly, or nothing is written and no error is shown. Check that the file exists.
• Rate limits: in our 54-video benchmark, yt-dlp got 39 of 44 videos from a home connection; the five misses were HTTP 429 errors on the subtitle download, mostly Shorts and long videos with automatic captions.
• Servers: from a cloud server the same benchmark hit a bot check on all five attempts and stopped.

For a handful of videos, the transcript downloader on this site needs no install and saves TXT, SRT, VTT, JSON, Markdown or CSV. For code that runs on a server, a hosted transcript API takes the blocking problem off your hands; the API comparison covers yt-dlp next to the hosted options.