Get closed caption "cc" for Youtube video

Question

Does any one know how to get the CC for any Youtube video that has the caption available? I know on the API 2.0 documentation mentions that it is only available for the owner of the video... but I was able to get some of the video's caption even though I'm not the owner of any....

There are two APIs (or links to API) can be used. they both rout to timpedtext API. before I mention them we should note the parameters the API need. which are:

• lang: {en, fr,...} required.
• v: {video ID} required.
• name: the track name, Required only if it is set. (and with this is my problem.)
• tlang: translation to language. optional (should be set if you like to translate the CC to other language.

The API links are:

1. http://video.google.com/timedtext?lang=fr&v=PILzP-bIeLo&name=french Note the above example would return nothing if you remove the name=French or set it to something else...

2. http://www.youtube.com/api/timedtext?v=zzfCVBSsvqA&lang=en Note this example would return nothing if you set the name=...

3. http://www.youtube.com/api/timedtext?v=ZdP0KM49IVk&lang=en yet the actual video has caption.

Example 3 does not return the CC data.

So I'm guessing that example 3 need to have the name parameter set. and my main problem is how do I find the name parameter if it is set or not. and if it is set how do I know what is it?

Emetic

Possible duplicate of Extract automatic captions from YouTube video – Pyrazole

If anyone is interested, I wrote a modern ES6/class/fetch YouTube caption grabber here: https://mcmap.net/q/394211/-get-youtube-captions – Cockpit

Answer 1

[update]: This was the preferred method until google recently discontinued it (writing as of dec 2021).

Your first example should work without the name= part. This did the job for me:

video.google.com/timedtext?lang={languageID}&v={videoId}

To fetch the english CC version from the previous answer, it would look like this:

http://video.google.com/timedtext?lang=en&v=zzfCVBSsvqA

Katlin

I created a functional JavaScript implementation here: https://mcmap.net/q/394211/-get-youtube-captions – Cockpit

As of today, this no longer seems to work. – Caldera

Answer 2

You can get the list of available captions with http://video.google.com/timedtext?type=list&v=zzfCVBSsvqA request.

Your 3rd video has only automatically generated captions, which you cannot fetch easily.

Lonesome

Request with a list param stopped working as of Nov 2021, any information, or possible workaround? – Celestial

Answer 3

Here my suggestions after spending some time:

• Js library: https://github.com/syzer/youtube-captions-scraper => support auto-generated caption.

• 2 quick methods below not support auto-generated caption

  • Get a list of subtitles: http://video.google.com/timedtext?type=list&v=lT3vGaOLWqE
  • Get subtitle with track id: http://video.google.com/timedtext?type=track&v=lT3vGaOLWqE&id=0&lang=en

• Quick download: http://downsub.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dag_EJRhMfOM

Fullrigged

Is there a way to get the source code of downsub.com ? – Trifoliate

Also, the module youtube-captions-scraper dose not work !! – Trifoliate

Answer 4

If video.google.com does not fetch your closed caption file OR you don't want your file in XML format, but would rather SRT (see note below), try:

CC SUBS

NOTE: SRT can be transformed into virtually ANY format - either using free subtitling tools OR by replacing \n\n with |, \n with ; and then | into \n, you get a CSV file that can be opened in a spreadsheet, for example.

Variegate