Export format
YouTube to SRT
Turn a YouTube video's captions into an .srt subtitle file, with each line's start and end time kept to the millisecond. SRT opens in VLC and imports into Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut and CapCut.
How it works
- Paste a YouTube video link or ID.
- Preview the numbered cues with their start and end times.
- Download the .srt file and load it in your player or editor.
What the SRT subtitles export looks like
Real output for “Me at the zoo”, the first video on YouTube, produced by the same code as the tool above.
1 00:00:01,200 --> 00:00:03,360 All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants 2 00:00:05,318 --> 00:00:07,974 the cool thing about these guys is that they have really... 3 00:00:07,974 --> 00:00:12,616 really really long trunks 4 00:00:12,616 --> 00:00:14,367 and that's cool 5 00:00:14,421 --> 00:00:15,733 (baaaaaaaaaaahhh!!) 6 00:00:16,881 --> 00:00:18,881 and that's pretty much all there is to say
Who it's for
- Video editors re-cutting or translating a video
- Viewers who want subtitles in an offline player
- Accessibility work that needs a caption file
Other formats
Need this for many videos?
Pull a playlist's transcripts with the playlist tool, or get the same data from code with the transcript API and MCP server.
YouTube to SRT: questions
What is an SRT file?
SubRip (.srt) is a plain-text subtitle format: a cue number, a start and end time like 00:01:02,500 --> 00:01:05,000, then the caption text. Almost every player and video editor reads it.
Why can a video show text but no SRT?
SRT needs the timing of each caption line. If we only have the text of a transcript without its timings, the tool offers plain text and Markdown instead.
What if a video has no captions?
The tool can only export captions YouTube already has, creator-written or auto-generated. Videos with captions turned off have nothing to export, and the tool tells you so.
Can I export a whole playlist or channel?
This page exports one video at a time. For a playlist, the playlist tool pulls transcripts for its videos; for whole channels or recurring exports, the API and MCP server return the same data for every video.
