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?
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
systemctl start tor
yt-dlp --proxy socks5://127.0.0.1:9050 --write-subs --write-auto-subs --skip-download [URL]
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/