Working on some miscellaneous tools to provide to the public, I noticed there was some interest by some to rip closed captions from YouTube videos. This tool will do exactly that. Simply enter a YouTube video URL; only if the video uploader has provided closed captions for the video will they be available to download.

Taken Offline Sorry for the inconvenience. There isn't anything wrong with this tool or the website, the problem lies with how YouTube provide data (through their legacy APIs) to people like me to make my tool possible. For many years this tool has been working perfectly fine but some time within the past month they decided to no longer provide the APIs I used. Because of this, my tool has stopped working, which means you can no longer view closed captions.

It IS still possible programmatically speaking however it will require me to change a whole lot of code and the data from YouTube is all different now. I believe this tool is popular so I will try to get it working whenever time permits.

Thank you for your understanding.
Date: 2021/Nov/22.

This tool does not (yet) provide automatic speech recognition closed captions. These are closed captions that YouTube generate automatically and may or may not rely on Google Translate if you're watching it in different languages. This tool will only give you closed captions that were supplied by the video uploader or by the community.

Automatic speech recognition is something YouTube have always changed throughout the years, this includes the way that data is accessed. It's not impossible but it's just a hassle to keep everything up to date.

Main article: YouTube CC Downloader - Information

YouTube is a website for uploading and sharing videos. Each video can be accompanied by closed captions, usually initialised as CCs. CCs are essentially the same as subtitles except they can be turned on and off at the viewer's discretion. There may be multiple CC "tracks" for a single video. These tracks are just separate CC data which may be the content translated to different languages or dialects. This enables a wider audience to understand what has been said in the video. For a video to demonstrate its use as well as explaining its use, please watch this video: YouTube Captions and Subtitles.

There is no doubt that some people will ask about the automatic captions YouTube provides. This is achieved by their ASR technology to attempt to translate spoken words in the video to readable text. Typically, ASR technology is a disaster, but it's a good laugh most of the time. The feature to view automatic captions will be available soon, after everything else is complete.

Upon submitting a YouTube URL that hasn't been submitted before, the server will download all the available CC tracks. Upon re-submission, the saved data will reload if it's 60 minutes old to make sure the data is always the latest, but without taking forever to load and wasting bandwidth.