YouTube Transcript/Subtitle API (including automatically generated subtitles)

This is an python API which allows you to get the transcripts/subtitles for a given YouTube video. It also works for automatically generated subtitles and it does not require a headless browser, like other selenium based solutions do!

Install

It is recommended to install this module by using pip:

pip install youtube_transcript_api

If you want to use it from source, you'll have to install the dependencies manually:

pip install -r requirements.txt

How to use it

You could either integrate this module into an existing application, or just use it via an CLI

In code

To get a transcript for a given video you can do:

from youtube_transcript_api import YouTubeTranscriptApi

YouTubeTranscriptApi.get_transcript(video_id)

This will return a list of dictionaries looking somewhat like this:

[
    {
        'text': 'Hey there',
        'start': 7.58,
        'duration': 6.13
    },
    {
        'text': 'how are you',
        'start': 14.08,
        'duration': 7.58
    },
    # ...
]

You can also add the languages param if you want to make sure the transcripts are retrieved in your desired language (it usually defaults to english).

YouTubeTranscriptApi.get_transcripts(video_ids, languages=['de', 'en'])

It's a list of language codes in a descending priority. In this example it will first try to fetch the german transcript ('de') and then fetch the english transcript ('en') if it fails to do so. As I can't provide a complete list of all working language codes with full certainty, you may have to play around with the language codes a bit, to find the one which is working for you!

To get transcripts for a list fo video ids you can call:

YouTubeTranscriptApi.get_transcripts(video_ids, languages=['de', 'en'])

languages also is optional here.

CLI

Execute the CLI script using the video ids as parameters and the results will be printed out to the command line:

youtube_transcript_api <first_video_id> <second_video_id> ...

The CLI also gives you the option to provide a list of preferred languages:

youtube_transcript_api <first_video_id> <second_video_id> ... --languages de en

If you would prefer to write it into a file or pipe it into another application, you can also output the results as json using the following line:

youtube_transcript_api <first_video_id> <second_video_id> ... --languages de en --json > transcripts.json

Proxy

You can specify a https/http proxy, which will be used during the requests to YouTube:

from youtube_transcript_api import YouTubeTranscriptApi

YouTubeTranscriptApi.get_transcript(video_id, proxies={"http": "http://user:pass@domain:port", "https": "https://user:pass@domain:port"})

As the proxies dict is passed on to the requests.get(...) call, it follows the format used by the requests library.

Using the CLI:

youtube_transcript_api <first_video_id> <second_video_id> --http-proxy http://user:pass@domain:port --https-proxy https://user:pass@domain:port

Warning

This code uses an undocumented part of the YouTube API, which is called by the YouTube web-client. So there is no guarantee that it won't stop working tomorrow, if they change how things work. I will however do my best to make things working again as soon as possible if that happens. So if it stops working, let me know!

Donation

If this project makes you happy by reducing your development time, you can make me happy by treating me to a cup of coffee :)