yt-transcript-api

✨ YT-TRANSCRIPT-API ✨

A lightweight JavaScript API and CLI for retrieving YouTube video transcripts and subtitles (including auto-generated and translated ones). No headless browsers required.

Author: Chintamani Pala

Features

• Fetch YouTube video transcripts (captions/subtitles) via API or CLI.
• Supports auto-generated and manually created transcripts.
• Supports translation (where available).
• No browser automation or scraping required.
• Proxy support for bypassing IP blocks.
• Multiple output formats: JSON, text, SRT, WebVTT, pretty-print.

Installation

npm install yt-transcript-api

Or clone this repository and install dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/chintamani-pala/yt-transcript-api.git
cd yt-transcript-api
npm install

Usage

As a Library (API)

const {
  YouTubeTranscriptApi,
  TranscriptListFetcher,
  ProxyConfig,
  GenericProxyConfig,
  WebshareProxyConfig,
  InvalidProxyConfig,
  formatters,
  errors,
  settings
} = require('yt-transcript-api');

const ytt_api = new YouTubeTranscriptApi();
const video_id = '0Okxsszt624';

ytt_api.fetch(video_id, ['en']).then(transcript => {
    console.log(transcript);
}).catch(err => {
    console.error(err);
});

API Exports

• YouTubeTranscriptApi - Main API class
• YouTubeTranscriptCli - CLI class
• TranscriptListFetcher - Fetches transcript lists
• ProxyConfig, GenericProxyConfig, WebshareProxyConfig, InvalidProxyConfig - Proxy support
• formatters - Output formatters (JSON, SRT, WebVTT, etc.)
• errors - Custom error classes
• settings - Internal constants

CLI Usage

You can use the CLI to fetch transcripts directly from the terminal.

npx yt-transcript-api --video-ids=0Okxsszt624 --format=json

CLI Options

• --video-ids (comma-separated list or positional arguments)
• --format (json, pretty, text, srt, webvtt)
  Default: pretty
• --languages (comma-separated, e.g. en,hi)
• --excludeManuallyCreated
• --excludeGenerated
• --httpProxy
• --httpsProxy
• --webshareProxyUsername
• --webshareProxyPassword
• --preserveFormatting

Example

npx yt-transcript-api --video-ids=0Okxsszt624 --format=json

Proxy Support

You can use proxies to bypass IP blocks.
Supports generic HTTP/HTTPS proxies and Webshare rotating residential proxies.

Example:

const { GenericProxyConfig, YouTubeTranscriptApi } = require('yt-transcript-api');
const proxyConfig = new GenericProxyConfig('http://your-proxy:port');
const ytt_api = new YouTubeTranscriptApi({ proxyConfig });

Output Formats

• pretty: Node.js util.inspect
• json: Raw JSON
• text: Plain text
• srt: SubRip Subtitle
• webvtt: Web Video Text Tracks

License

MIT

Author

Chintamani Pala