YouTube captions as subtitle files
A transcript is the words. A subtitle file is the words plus the exact time each line appears on screen. TubeToTranscript exports a YouTube video's captions in both subtitle formats, SRT and VTT, ready for editors, players, and course platforms.
Download subtitles →SRT or VTT?
| SRT | VTT (WebVTT) | |
|---|---|---|
| Looks like | Numbered cues, times with a comma: 00:00:04,200 | Starts with WEBVTT, times with a dot: 00:00:04.200 |
| Best for | Video editors, desktop players, re-uploading captions | HTML5 web players and online course platforms |
If a tool asks for "subtitles" without saying which, SRT is the safer choice. Both formats are plain text, so you can open them in any text editor.
1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:04,200 Welcome back. Today we're looking at 2 00:00:04,200 --> 00:00:08,900 how tides are caused by the moon.
Common things people do with them
- Edit a video: import the SRT into Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, or CapCut instead of captioning from scratch.
- Watch offline: put the SRT next to a video file with the same name, and players such as VLC load it automatically.
- Publish on a website: attach the VTT to an HTML5 <video> element with a <track> tag.
- Translate: with Pro, translate the transcript into another language and download that as SRT or VTT, with every timestamp kept.
Before you use them
Auto-generated captions can have wrong words and little punctuation, so read them through before publishing. And only re-upload subtitles to videos you own or have permission to caption. There are dedicated pages for YouTube to SRT and YouTube to VTT.