YouTube Subtitle Downloader
Save any video's captions as SRT, VTT, or TXT — every language, including auto-generated tracks.
💡 Tip: browsing available languages is free — no account needed until you download a file
Why Use Our YouTube Subtitle Downloader?
How to Download YouTube Subtitles
Paste a YouTube link
Copy the URL of the video whose captions you want and paste it into the field above, then hit Find Subtitles.
Pick a language and format
We list every caption track the video has — manual and auto-generated, in every language. Choose one, then pick SRT, VTT, or TXT.
Download the subtitle file
Sign in with a free account and the file saves straight to your device, ready for video editors, media players, or translation work.
Who Downloads Subtitles?
SRT, VTT or TXT: which one do you want?
All three contain the same words. The difference is how the timing is written, and that decides which software will accept the file.
.srt SubRip— Video editors and desktop players
The default choice. Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut, VLC, Plex and every TV that reads a subtitle file all accept SRT. Timestamps use a comma before the milliseconds (00:00:04,120) — that comma is the difference from VTT, and it is what trips up web players.
.vtt WebVTT— HTML5 video on the web
What a <track> element in a browser expects. Starts with a WEBVTT header line and uses a period before the milliseconds (00:00:04.120). Use it for anything you are embedding on a page; most browsers silently refuse to render an SRT.
.txt Plain text— Reading, quoting, AI tools
Timestamps stripped, just the words. Good for pasting into a document or an AI chat. If this is all you need, the transcript extractor does the same job without an account.
If you are unsure, take the SRT. It is the format the most software accepts, and converting it later is trivial — our subtitle converter turns it into VTT or plain text in one step.
What to do with the file once you have it
Keep it as a sidecar file
The simplest option: put the .srt next to the video with the same base name and most players pick it up automatically. The subtitles stay switchable, and you can edit the text later without touching the video. This is what you want for personal viewing and for anything you might revise.
Burn them into the picture
Sometimes called hardcoded or open captions. The text becomes part of the video frames, so it survives anywhere — including social platforms that autoplay muted and ignore sidecar files. The trade-off is permanence: you cannot turn them off, translate them, or fix a typo without re-rendering the whole video.
Upload them to your own video
If you are the creator, uploading a real caption file to YouTube replaces the auto-generated track with something accurate and searchable. A common workflow: download your own video’s auto-captions here, fix the punctuation and the proper nouns in a text editor, then upload the corrected file back. It is much faster than typing captions from scratch.
For translation, the same file is your starting point — the timings are already right, so a translator only has to replace the text between them.
When subtitles don’t behave
My subtitles are out of sync in the editor
Why: Almost always a frame-rate mismatch: the file was timed against a 30fps source and you dropped it onto a 25fps timeline, or vice versa. The drift grows steadily through the video rather than staying constant.
Fix: Retime in your editor, or re-download after confirming the source video's frame rate. A constant offset (everything late by the same amount) is a different problem — just shift the whole track.
The player ignores my subtitle file
Why: Either the format is wrong for the player (an SRT handed to an HTML5 <track>), or the filename doesn't match. Most desktop players auto-load a sidecar file only when it is named exactly like the video.
Fix: Rename it to match the video file, e.g. talk.mp4 alongside talk.srt, and keep them in the same folder. For web embeds, use the VTT.
Accented or non-Latin characters show as garbage
Why: The file is UTF-8 and something opened it as a legacy encoding. Older hardware players and some TVs are the usual culprits.
Fix: Re-save the file as UTF-8 with BOM in a text editor, or use a player that handles UTF-8 properly.
Only auto-generated captions are listed
Why: The creator never uploaded a real caption file. The language list marks which tracks are auto-generated so you can tell before you download.
Fix: Nothing to fix on our end — but expect missing punctuation and mangled proper nouns, and proofread before publishing anything based on it.
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