Export format
YouTube to text
Paste a YouTube link and get the transcript as plain text: clean paragraphs you can read, search, quote or paste anywhere. Turn on timestamps to keep a [m:ss] marker on every line.
How it works
- Paste a YouTube video link or ID.
- Leave timestamps off for clean reading text, or turn them on to keep the timing of each line.
- Copy the text or download it as a .txt file.
What the Plain text export looks like
Real output for “Me at the zoo”, the first video on YouTube, produced by the same code as the tool above.
All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants the cool thing about these guys is that they have really... really really long trunks and that's cool (baaaaaaaaaaahhh!!) and that's pretty much all there is to say
Who it's for
- Students turning a lecture into notes
- Writers quoting what someone said
- Anyone who would rather read than watch
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 text: questions
How do I convert a YouTube video to text?
Paste the video link above. The transcript appears as plain paragraphs, ready to copy or download as a .txt file.
Can I keep the timestamps?
Yes. Turn on timestamps and every line starts with a [m:ss] marker, so you can jump back to that moment in the video.
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.