YouTube Transcripts Without the API — Extract Captions Programmatically

YouTube's official API doesn't even have a transcripts endpoint. But there's another way. How YouTube Loads Captions When you watch a video with captions enabled, YouTube fetches an XML file with timestamped text. The URL is embedded in the page's player response. Steps Fetch the video page and extract captionTracks from the player response Find the right language — tracks include language code and auto-generated flag Fetch the XML from the track's baseUrl Parse timestamps — each <text> element has start and dur attributes Output { "videoId" : "dQw4w9WgXcQ" , "language" : "en" , "isAutoGenerated" : true , "wordCount" : 285 , "fullText" : "We're no strangers to love..." , "entries" : [{ "start" : 18.0 , "duration" : 3.5 , "text" : "We're no strangers to love" }] } Use Cases Content repurposing (video → blog post) AI training data from video content Accessibility analysis Translation workflows I built a YouTube Transcript Scraper — free on Apify (search knotless_cadence youtube-transcrip