Paste a channel link, an @handle or a UC… ID to see its recent uploads, then extract the transcript for any of them with timestamps you can click. No extension, no account to look around.
Listing a channel and extracting a transcript draw on two separate daily allowances — listing is roomy, extraction is not. Create a free account to lift both.
This is a YouTube channel transcript extractor in two steps, and it keeps those steps apart deliberately, because one of them is cheap and the other is not.
@handle or a channel ID starting with UC all resolve to the same channel, and the most recent uploads come back with title, length, view count and publish date.Your browser never talks to YouTube and never holds an API key. Both requests go to our server, which does the fetching.
Most free tools hide their limits until you hit one. These are worth explaining, because the difference between them is the whole economics of the service.
| Action | Free allowance | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Listing a channel | 15 lookups per day | A metadata request. It costs us almost nothing, so the bucket is roomy and you can browse several channels before it matters. |
| Extracting a transcript | 3 extractions per day | Caption tracks are fetched through metered residential bandwidth that we pay for per gigabyte. That is the real cost of this service, so the free bucket is small and honest rather than large and quietly throttled. |
The hint under the input shows whichever allowance you have spent, using the same wording the API returns, so you always know which of the two is running down. A free account replaces both with 20 credits and an API key.
The Extract all button does not start anything. It scrolls you to an explanation of why bulk extraction lives in the API instead. There is no hidden queue, no fake progress bar, and no request you did not press a button for.
A channel listing always works. Extraction depends on YouTube serving a caption track for that particular video, and sometimes it will not — no tool can invent one without re-transcribing the audio.
When one fails, the reason is shown on that row and the others are unaffected. Note that auto-generated captions carry the usual speech-recognition mistakes — names, acronyms and crosstalk are the usual casualties — so proofread anything you quote publicly.
If you are building a search index over a creator's back catalogue, feeding a model, or keeping a running archive, the browser is the wrong place for it. The API does the same two steps this page does, without the per-visitor caps:
A free account comes with an API key and 20 credits, and no card is asked for. The API reference covers the endpoints and the cookbook has a channel-wide loop you can copy. For a single video, the transcript tool is quicker.
Not from this page. It lists the channel's videos for free and extracts them one at a time, because each extraction runs through metered residential bandwidth that costs us real money. Bulk is what the API is for: one key, a channel endpoint that returns the same list, and a transcript endpoint you loop over it.
A full channel URL, an @handle such as @veritasium, or a raw channel ID beginning with UC. You do not need to find the uploads playlist yourself — paste whichever form you have and the lookup resolves it.
They are two separate allowances because they cost us two very different things. Listing a channel is a cheap metadata lookup, so the bucket is roomy. Fetching a caption track goes through metered residential proxy bandwidth, which is the expensive part of this service, so that bucket is small. The tool always shows you which allowance you are spending.
Any video where YouTube will not serve a caption track: captions disabled by the uploader, private or deleted videos, age-restricted videos, and very recent uploads where automatic captions have not finished processing. Those rows will list fine and fail on extraction, with the reason shown.
Call the API. Request the channel's video list, then request a transcript per video ID in whatever format you need — JSON, TXT, SRT or VTT. The cookbook has a working loop you can copy, and a free account comes with 20 credits and no card.