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 owne

Answer 1

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

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.

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

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.