Is it possible to download the automatic captions from a video?

Question

My goal is to download automatic caption from a set of youtube videos. (I just want to get video information and subtitles of videos according to a query) The first thing I read is that you cannot download subtitles if you are not the owner. But I do not want the subtitles the owner uploaded, I just need the automatic ones.

For that I've seen some solutions, most of them with external applications . One of them is thorugh this URL: http://video.google.com/timedtext?type=track&v=3wszM2SA12E&name=Automatic&lang=en The problem are:

1. that this is not the best way to access youtube data.
2. It doesnt work with every video.

Does Youtube API offer a way to access this information?

Thank you in advance!!

Solution 1

You can download automatic captions for virtually any YouTube video that has them visible to the public at a site which I have created for being able to edit YouTube's automatic captions.

Go to this page, www.diycaptions.com, and then paste the URL for the video in the second input box on the page which will take you to the Transcription Pad. On that page, you will see links for downloading the automatic captions for the video you specified either in .srt format or in plain text format (.txt).

If you want to correct them, you can use the editor on my site to very easily make corrections. Just paste the YouTube URL into the first input box on the page and you'll be taken to an integrated editor where you can easily make the text accurate and suitable for upload to YouTube or to third-party captioning sites like www.amara.org or www.dotsub.com.

Solution 2

Yes it is (as of now). There is a tool called youtube-dl. It supports many options that one could check alone. Just as an example:

>youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOUR_VIDEO_HASH --write-auto-sub --sub-lang en

This will download the video along with the auto-generated subtitles in english.

Comments

[bouncingHippo]

is there anyway to get the timing indications?

[Sergei]

diycaptions.com does not work - Select Action is broken

[titusfx]

It doesn't work always, depends on the video.

[Kristopher]

seemed to work as of today - downloaded auto-generated closed caption text in a variety of options