YouTube Subtitle Transcript

This library fetches transcripts of YouTube videos. It leverages YouTube's built-in captions and parses them into a friendly JSON format.

Installation

npm install youtube-subtitle-transcript

Usage

import { fetchTranscript } from "youtube-subtitle-transcript";

const { subtitles, error } = await fetchTranscript("dQw4w9WgXcQ");
console.log(subtitles);

API Reference

fetchTranscript(videoId: string, languageCode?: string): Promise<FetchTranscriptResult>

• videoId: YouTube video ID (required).
• languageCode: Language code for the transcript (defaults to "en"). The library will always return manually created transcripts over automatically generated ones.
• Returns a Promise resolving to a FetchTranscriptResult object.

FetchTranscriptResult interface

• transcript: An array of TranscriptEntry objects. If no transcript can be found, the array will be empty.
• error: An optional error message that will be present when a transcript cannot be found. Primarily to assist with debugging.

TranscriptEntry interface

• text: The transcript text content.
• start: Starting time of the transcript segment in seconds (e.g. "1.23").
• duration: Duration of the transcript segment in seconds (e.g. "5.67").

Credit

This library was highly inspired by youtube-transcript-api. It is written in Python and has a lot more features than this one.

License and disclaimer

MIT. This library uses undocumented parts of the YouTube API. It may break tomorrow.