Show HN: I create a free website for download YouTube transcript, subtitle

I use this script, because automatically generated subtitles are badly formatted as transcript (only good as subtitles). It works pretty well to archive the videos including the transcript and subtitles.

```

#!/bin/zsh

# download as mp4, get normal subtitles

yt-dlp -f mp4 "$@" --write-auto-sub --sub-format best --write-sub

# download subtitles and convert them to transcript

yt-dlp --skip-download --write-subs --write-auto-subs --sub-lang en -k --sub-format ttml --convert-subs srt --exec before_dl:"sed -e '/^[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9].[0-9][0-9][0-9] --> [0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9].[0-9][0-9][0-9]$/d' -e '/^[[:digit:]]\{1,3\}$/d' -e 's/<[^>]>//g' -e '/^[[:space:]]$/d' -i '' %(requested_subtitles.:.filepath)#q" "$@"

```

Checking online, this [1] appears to be one of the most heavily referenced on StackOverflow for downloading both user entered and automatically generated transcripts. (Python based)

[1] https://github.com/jdepoix/youtube-transcript-api

Notably, Google really needs to have an obvious API endpoint for this kind of call. If 1000's of programmers are all rolling their own implementation, there's probably a huge number that constantly download the full video and transcribe in data harvesting.

Kind of surprised honestly it's taken this long for Youtube to fall prey to massive data harvesting campaigns. From this article [2] and this paper on Youtube data statistics [3] there are ~14,000,000,000 videos on Youtube with a mean length of 615 seconds (~10 minutes).

You'd think people would be interested in:

  8,610,000,000,000 seconds
  143,500,000,000 minutes
  2,391,666,666 hours
  3,274,083 months
  272,840 years
  27,284 decades
  2,728 centuries
  273 millennia

Of live action video on nearly every single subject in human existence.

Also, the paper's really cool and extremely sobering about being a "content creator" based on the 1% get all views.

[2] "What We Discovered on ‘Deep YouTube’", https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/01/how-m...

[3] "Dialing for Videos: A Random Sample of YouTube", https://journalqd.org/article/view/4066/3766

I’m also doing this but it adds punctuations, paragraphs and chapter headers because most raw YouTube transcripts lack proper punctuation

https://www.appblit.com/scribe

yt-dlp[1] can also do this:

```

$ yt-dlp --write-sub --sub-lang "en.*" --write-auto-sub --skip-download 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=…'

```

[1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

I see lots of yt-dlp commands here so…

PSA: yt-dlp exits non-zero if destination filename or any of intermediate files’ names are too long for the filesystem. Use `-o "%(title).150B [%(id)s].%(ext)s"` to limit filename length(to 150 bytes in this example). “--trim-filenames” don’t work.

Here is mine: https://www.val.town/v/taras/scrape2md

Use it like https://taras-scrape2md.web.val.run/https://youtu.be/TJqeCpx...

This is meant to be a general purpose content-to-markdown tool for llm interactions in https://chatcraft.org

I liked also this one:

https://filmot.com/

Here you can search the subtitles of YouTube videos.

How are you getting the transcripts? Using the private YT API like in https://www.npmjs.com/package/youtube-transcript?

How do I actually search files with timestamps (preferably from the CLI)?

I can use rg if the search terms happen to be on the same line but if the terms span multiple lines the interleaved timestamp metadata will prevent the query from being matched.

I still can't find a good service for accurate subtitle for auto generated videos, always gibberish here and there.

Hi guy, I still get an error that shows Client Error: Too Many Requests for URL. So YouTube blocked the IP right?

Is there any way to extract the transcripts from JS state on YouTube, instead of making API reqs for them?

It use youtube_transcript_api

What a great service. Thanks!