youtube-captions

Extract timestamped captions from YouTube videos. Output is VTT format (timestamps preserved).

Prerequisites

• yt-dlp — REQUIRED (brew install yt-dlp)
• openai-whisper — REQUIRED only if video has no subtitles (pip install openai-whisper)
  • First run downloads the small model (~500MB)
  • Transcription is significantly slower than subtitle download

Usage

bash scripts/get-captions.sh <youtube-url> [language]

• youtube-url — any valid YouTube video URL
• language — subtitle language code (default: en)