Getting YouTube auto-transcript from API?

Question

Is it possible to pull the auto (non-user) generated video transcripts from any of the YouTube APIs?

Answer 1

As of Aug 2019 the following method you to download transcripts:

1. Open in Browser

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[Video ID]

2. From Console type:
   JSON.parse(ytplayer.config.args.player_response).captions.playerCaptionsTracklistRenderer.captionTracks[0].baseUrl

Answer 2

You may refer with this thread: How to get "transcript" in youtube-api v3

If you're authenticating with oAuth2, you could do a quick call to this feed:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/[VIDEOID]/captiondata/[CAPTIONTRACKID]

to get the data you want. To retrieve a list of possible caption track IDs with v2 of the API, you access this feed:

https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/[VIDEOID]/captions

That feed request also accepts some optional parameters, including language, max-results, etc. For more details, along with a sample that shows the returned format of the caption track list, see the documentation at https://developers.google.com/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_protocol_captions#Retrieve_Caption_Set

Also, here are some references which migh help:

• https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-way-to-download-the-YouTube-transcripts-that-are-generated-automatically
• http://ccm.net/faq/40644-how-to-get-the-transcript-of-a-youtube-video