yt-transcript-cli 0.1.2

Fetch YouTube video and playlist transcripts from the command line

yt-transcript-cli

Fetch YouTube video and playlist transcripts from the command line.

Installation

Install from PyPI:

pip install yt-transcript-cli

Install from GitHub

pip install git+https://github.com/kirinmurphy/youtube-transcript-cli.git

Or install locally for development:

git clone https://github.com/kirinmurphy/youtube-transcript-cli.git
cd youtube-transcript-cli
pip install -e .

Usage

After installation, the yt-transcript-cli command is available.

Single video

yt-transcript-cli "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID"

Multiple videos

yt-transcript-cli "URL1" "URL2" "URL3"

Playlist

yt-transcript-cli "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAYLIST_ID"

Public and unlisted playlists are supported. Private playlists are not accessible.

From a file

yt-transcript-cli -f urls.txt

Where urls.txt contains one URL per line. Lines starting with # are ignored.

Interactive mode

yt-transcript-cli -i

Or just run with no arguments:

yt-transcript-cli

This opens a REPL where you can paste URLs one at a time, then press Enter on an empty line to process them all.

REPL commands

Command	Description
/help, /h	Show help
/status, /s	Show pending URLs
/clear, /c	Clear pending URLs
/process, /p	Process pending URLs
/quit, /q	Exit

Options

Flag	Description	Default
-o, --output-dir	Output directory for transcript files	. (current directory)
-l, --lang	Language code (e.g., en, es)	auto-detect
-q, --quiet	Suppress progress messages	off
-d, --delay	Seconds between requests (rate limiting)	1.5
-f, --file	Read URLs from a file	-
-i, --interactive	Force interactive REPL mode	-

Supported URL formats

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID
• https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID
• https://youtube.com/shorts/VIDEO_ID
• https://youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID
• https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAYLIST_ID
• Plain video ID (11 characters)

Behavior

• Transcripts are saved as transcript_{VIDEO_ID}.txt in the output directory
• Existing transcripts are skipped automatically (won't re-download)
• Playlists are expanded to individual videos
• A rate limit delay is applied between requests (configurable with -d)
• Output is a single continuous block of text (no line breaks between segments)

Use as a library

from yt_transcript import fetch_transcript, to_text, parse_youtube_url

video_id = parse_youtube_url("https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID")
segments = fetch_transcript(video_id)
text = to_text(segments)

Available functions

Function	Description
parse_youtube_url(url)	Extract video ID from a YouTube URL
fetch_transcript(video_id, lang=None)	Fetch transcript segments
to_text(segments)	Convert segments to plain text
is_playlist_url(url)	Check if a URL contains a playlist
fetch_playlist_video_ids(url)	Get all video IDs from a playlist