Yt-transcriber – Give a YouTube URL and get a transcription
54 comments
·July 22, 2025paulirish
adamgordonbell
Recently, I was working on a similar project and I found that grabbing the transcripts quickly leads to your IP being blocked for the transcripts.
I ended up doing the same as this person, downloading the MP4s and then transcribing myself. I was assuming it was some sort of anti LLM scraper feature they put in place.
Has anyone used this --write-auto-subs flag and not been flagged after doing 20 or so videos?
hamiecod
—-write-auto-subs gets your IP banned for 12/24 hours if you download video subtitles in bulk but if the subtitles are downloaded with sufficient time gap in between, the ban is not triggered.
My startup has to utilize youtube transcriptions so we just subscribe to a youtube transcriptor api hosted on rapidapi that downloads subtitles. 1$ per 1000 reqs. Pretty cheap
MysticOracle
Yep, this happened to me & got IP banned for a day.
thangalin
systemctl start tor
yt-dlp --proxy socks5://127.0.0.1:9050 --write-subs --write-auto-subs --skip-download [URL]
ldenoue
Unless you fetch directly from your browser. It works by getting the YouTube json including the captions track. And then you get the baseUrl to download the xml.
I wrote this webapp that uses this method: it calls Gemini in the background to polish the raw transcript and produce a much better version with punctuation and paragraphs.
https://www.appblit.com/scribe
Open source with code to see how to fetch from YouTube servers from the browser https://ldenoue.github.io/readabletranscripts/
toomuchtodo
It's a good call out. I leverage yt-dlp as a library for downstream tooling (archival of media to long term storage repositories), and always recommend folks rely on yt-dlp whenever possible due to the ecosystem of folks grinding to keep their extractors current. Their maintainers are both helpful and responsive.
(with that said, I do not want to diminish OP's work in any way; great job! "What I cannot build, I do not understand" - Feynman)
paulirish
Same, yup. OP is indeed already using yt-dlp for the video download. (Then Whisper for transcribing, Ollama/lmstudio/OpenAI for summarizing)
hiAndrewQuinn
Minus the summarization, that is the same pipeline I use in [1] for generating listening practice Anki flashcards for foreign language students. It surprised me that nobody had really built out a program I could find around yt-dlp and Whisper for this kind of use case even a few years after it came out.
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mckirk
I've found the YT transcripts to be severely lacking sometimes, in accuracy and features. Especially speaker identification is really useful if you want to e.g. summarize podcasts or interviews, so if this project here delivers on that then it's definitely better than the YT transcripts.
paulirish
An approach I've been using recently is to rely on pyannote/tinydiarize only for the speaker_turn timestamps, but prefer the larger model (or in this case YT's autotranscript) for the actual text.
ldenoue
Check out https://ldenoue.github.io/readabletranscripts/ and the website https://www.appblit.com/scribe that use Gemini to post correct the raw transcripts
stanleykm
I’ve had some success with running them through another LLM to have it clean up the transcription errors based on the context. But this obviously does nothing for speaker identitication.
rpastuszak
IIRC YT also has a "private" API you can call directly (or via an npm package: youtube-transcribe).
(I'm using it in https://butter.sonnet.io)
Jerry2
Yep. You can also automatically save them if you use mpv to watch YT: https://github.com/nick-s-b/mpv-transcript discovered this script yesterday.
entelechy0
[dead]
MysticOracle
For (English only) speech-to-text, NVIDIA's Parakeet-V2 is significantly faster than Whisper and I found it to be more accurate.
https://huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2
For Apple Silicon (MLX) https://huggingface.co/senstella/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2-mlx
driscoll42
Compared to all Whister models? Or the faster ones? And which version of Whisper? All for a faster, more accurate model, but need a bit more.
ipsum2
All of them, in my experience.
driscoll42
Fair, looking at the ASR leaderboards it is truly better - https://huggingface.co/spaces/hf-audio/open_asr_leaderboard and NVIDIA's Canary might be even better? Will try these out. Appreciate bringing these to my attention!
toddmorey
Always fascinated to read CLAUDE.md files that are appearing in more and more open source projects: https://github.com/pmarreck/yt-transcriber/blob/yolo/CLAUDE....
I'd be really curious to see some sort of benchmark / evaluation of these context resources against the same coding tasks. Right now, the instructions all sound so prescriptive and authoritative, yet is really hard to evaluation their effectiveness.
0points
Youtube already offers AI transcriptions on their site. As another commenter points out, you grab them with yt-dlp.
And unlike how your tool will be supported in the future, thousands of users make sure yt-dlp keeps working as google keep changing the site (currently 1459 contributors).
swyx
if you used this in earnest sufficiently, you'd know yt default transcripts are not good enough because youtube often (ok say 5% of time) fails to transcribe videos particularly livestreams and shortly after release.
youtube also blocks transcript exports for some things like https://youtubetranscript.com/
retranscribing is necessary and important part of the creator toolset.
passivegains
the volunteer open source effort behind youtube-dl and its forks/descendants are so impressive in large part because of how many features they provide and thus have to maintain: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp#usage-and-options this tool won't provide the list of available thumbnails or settings for HTTP buffer size, but I think that's a pretty reasonable tradeoff.
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eigenvalue
I made a tool like this a while ago which was useful for transcribing a whole playlist automatically using whisper:
https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/bulk_transcribe_youtube...
I ended up turning a beefed up version of it which makes polished written documents from the raw transcript, you can try it at
labrador
Many channels I follow, such as Vlad Vexler, have taken measures so you can't download the transcript with yt-dlp. Furthermore, they don't provide a transcipt option on their videos. I assume this is to prevent people from just reading AI summaries, which is annoying in Vexler's case because he talks slowly and meanders around. If I really want to hear his point but don't want to listen to that then I download the video with yt-dlp and use Whisper to transcribe it.
Bluestein
... the ... slower ... the guy the ... less ... content ... and ... more ... advertising.-
dudeWithAMood
I did something similar piping the output of the youtube-transcript-api python package to openAI's api: https://github.com/DavidZirinsky/tl-dw/
totallynotryan
Hey all, I built a 100% free (no-signup) youtube summarizer: "https://youtube-summarizer-lime.vercel.app/". Accurate summaries in under 8 seconds.
dudeWithAMood
How did you get around youtube blocking cloud IP ranges? Are you suing residential proxies?
93po
bookmarked, thanks, the top google search results always require sign-up. frustrating state of the internet
Leftium
Two similar Show HN projects:
- This python one is more amenable to modding into your own custom tool: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/44353447
- Another bash script: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/41473379
---
They all seem to be built on top of:
- yt-dlp to download video
- whisper for transcription
- ffmpeg for audio/video extraction/processing
cmaury
Thanks for sharing. This is exactly the type of utility that vibecoding is for. It takes 5 secons to ask GPT to write a scripr to do this tailored to your specific use case. It's way faster than trying to get someone elses repo up and running.
sannysanoff
Selfware.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTCoding/comments/1lusr07/self...
Gonna be lots of posts of selfware like that soon.
cmaury
I like it, though I'm sure we'll end up being stuck with "vibe ware"
Bluestein
I think you either coined (kudos) or spotted the true "term du jour" here.-
sannysanoff
people don't even get it :-]
Bluestein
Sure thing ...
And, yes, indeed, AI-coding is order-of-magnitude having an effect along the lines that "low-code" was treading ...
... also, for less-capable coders or "borderline" coders the effort/benefit equation has radically shifted.-
isubkhankulov
I’ve been using this free tool. It gives quality diarized transcripts https://contentflow.megalabs.co
arkaic
On this note, is Ytube also the best transcriber of foreign languages or is there something better?
Can also just fetch the subs already in YouTube rather than retranscribing. eg:
yt-dlp --write-auto-subs --skip-download "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xTGNNLPyMI"