How to get "transcript" in youtube-api v3

Question

I have started using v3 of the YouTube apis on an android device, using the java client library. Some videos that I am interested in have transcripts that I can access on the web interface (like educational videos). Is there a way to access the transcripts, if present, using the v3 apis?

Thanks

Are you talking about a server api or a client api? – Ken Sharp Feb 22 '16 at 13:46 — Ken Sharp, Feb 22 '16 at 13:46

score 43 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:09

43

I had the same problem with this... and spent like a week looking for a solution until I hit this:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10036796/how-to-extract-subtitles-from-youtube-videos

Just do a GET request on: http://video.google.com/timedtext?lang={LANG}&v={VIDEOID} You don't need any api/oauth/etc. to access this.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:09

Community

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answered Feb 04 '14 at 10:49

Dev Doomari

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Do you have any examples of this working? I tried a couple video id's along with every variation of language code I could think of and didn't get a reply. – streetlogics Apr 02 '14 at 04:31
3

Worked fine for me. Excelent job! – Fernando Freitas Alves May 31 '14 at 04:41
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this seems to work when the captions were entered manually, as opposed to be created automagically by youtube. – popstack May 27 '15 at 14:04
just add "track=asr" to your url if you want to get the the auto-generated ones – Daniel Vygolov Sep 27 '17 at 07:51
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+1 for the information but it is not working for me too, I have uploaded video and generated captions automatically `http://video.google.com/timedtext?lang=en&v=h2pWeot3MJY&track=asr` but not getting caption from the video and it does not seems possible. – manish1706 Jan 02 '18 at 08:46
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None of the solutions I could find allowed me to retrieve automatically generated subtitles. Therefore I came up with a bit more complex solution. Code can be found on my GitHub if anyone is still interested: https://github.com/jdepoix/youtube-transcript-api – jdepoix Apr 20 '18 at 14:02
The list of tracks can be found with `http://video.google.com/timedtext?type=list&v={video_id}`. (Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/25888118/5445670.) – Solomon Ucko Mar 08 '19 at 13:54
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Interesting case: I used the option @SolomonUcko mentioned (`?type=list`) to get the track list for this video: `CWlbjXwUMJI`, but then when trying to retrieve the track with `?lang=en&v=CWlbjXwUMJI` I just get a blank screen. YouTube error or is it selectively protecting some captions for some videos? – Chris Dec 15 '19 at 10:23
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Currently, it's not working. – Nam Lee Sep 29 '22 at 15:35
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The post you linked to is no longer available – katiedev Feb 02 '23 at 05:54

Ken Sharp · Answer 2 · 2017-03-15T12:44:08.970

With API v3 you can first grab the available transcripts with the snippet:

https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/captions?videoId=U1e2VNtEqm4&part=snippet&key=(my_api_key):

{
 "kind": "youtube#captionListResponse",
 "etag": "\"DsOZ7qVJA4mxdTxZeNzis6uE6ck/aGHflncRxq1Uz6m1akhrOLUWUqU\"",
 "items": [
  {
   "kind": "youtube#caption",
   "etag": "\"DsOZ7qVJA4mxdTxZeNzis6uE6ck/IC7rNKkn3SQNdovFwR6fEabUYnY\"",
   "id": "TqXDnlamg84o4bX0q2oaHz4nfWZdyiZMOrcuWsSLyPc=",
   "snippet": {
    "videoId": "U1e2VNtEqm4",
    "lastUpdated": "2016-01-25T21:50:27.142Z",
    "trackKind": "standard",
    "language": "en-GB",
    "name": "",
    "audioTrackType": "unknown",
    "isCC": false,
    "isLarge": false,
    "isEasyReader": false,
    "isDraft": false,
    "isAutoSynced": false,
    "status": "serving"
   }
  },
  {
   "kind": "youtube#caption",
   "etag": "\"DsOZ7qVJA4mxdTxZeNzis6uE6ck/5UP1qPkmq6mzTUaEVnFC8WqjFgU\"",
   "id": "TqXDnlamg84o4bX0q2oaHw_Y53ilUWv6vMFbk0RL3XY=",
   "snippet": {
    "videoId": "U1e2VNtEqm4",
    "lastUpdated": "2016-01-25T21:55:07.481Z",
    "trackKind": "standard",
    "language": "en-US",
    "name": "",
    "audioTrackType": "unknown",
    "isCC": false,
    "isLarge": false,
    "isEasyReader": false,
    "isDraft": false,
    "isAutoSynced": false,
    "status": "serving"
   }
  }
 ]
}

And then pick the transcript you want:

https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/captions/id?id=TqXDnlamg84o4bX0q2oaHz4nfWZdyiZMOrcuWsSLyPc=

or

https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/captions/TqXDnlamg84o4bX0q2oaHz4nfWZdyiZMOrcuWsSLyPc=

at which point you need provide an authorization key. Apparently a simple key isn't enough. Possibly because:

Quota impact: A call to this method has a quota cost of approximately 200 units.

Note the slight difference in the URLs (/caption/ versus /caption?).

All the lovely documentation is here: https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/captions

can't pick the transcript using id, showing error 404 "The caption track could not be found. Check the value of the requests id parameter to ensure that it is correct." — Abhishek Ramachandran, Oct 20 '16 at 04:15
`pick the transcript you want` - this part don't work with an API Key, gives error HTTP 401, Login Required.: "API keys are not supported by this API. Expected OAuth2 access token or other authentication credentials that assert a principal. See https://cloud.google.com/docs/authentication" — Kos, Nov 17 '21 at 10:24

jlmcdonald · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-28T17:20:41.723

8

I may be wrong, but I don't think there is yet a documented way to get the caption track via v3 of the API. If you're authenticating with oAuth2, however, your authentication will also be good for v2 of the API, so you could do a quick call to this feed:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/[VIDEOID]/captiondata/[CAPTION TRACKID]

to get the data you want. To retrieve a list of possible caption track IDs with v2 of the API, you access this feed:

https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/[VIDEOID]/captions

That feed request also accepts some optional parameters, including language, max-results, etc. For more details, along with a sample that shows the returned format of the caption track list, see the documentation at https://developers.google.com/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_protocol_captions#Retrieve_Caption_Set

edited Dec 28 '12 at 17:20

answered Dec 28 '12 at 06:49

jlmcdonald

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2
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Thanks for your reply. How do I obtain the [caption trackid]? I can't see that in the v3 apis either .... – Ali Naddaf Dec 28 '12 at 15:05
This API will be dropped. How can I replace with v3? – Victor Apr 10 '15 at 19:22
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Captions were added to V3 last week; here is the documentation. https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/captions – jlmcdonald Apr 10 '15 at 22:50
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`https://gdata.youtube.com` API has been moved to `https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/videos/` so pls use this on as of 2018 January – manish1706 Jan 03 '18 at 05:28
Can this method retrieve transcripts of videos not owned by myself? – William Dec 17 '20 at 15:44

score 6 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 29 '16 at 04:30

Heres some code I wrote which grabs all the caption tracks from any youtube video without having to use the API. Just plug the video URL in the $video_url variable.

// get video id from url
$video_url = 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYX87kkyubk';
preg_match("#(?<=v=)[a-zA-Z0-9-]+(?=&)|(?<=v\/)[^&\n]+(?=\?)|(?<=v=)[^&\n]+|(?<=youtu.be/)[^&\n]+#", $video_url, $matches);

// get video info from id
$video_id = $matches[0];
$video_info = file_get_contents('http://www.youtube.com/get_video_info?&video_id='.$video_id);
parse_str($video_info, $video_info_array);

if (isset($video_info_array['caption_tracks'])) {
    $tracks = explode(',', $video_info_array['caption_tracks']);

    // print info for each track (including url to track content)
    foreach ($tracks as $track) {
        parse_str($track, $output);
        print_r($output);
    }
}

I have create a code based on your logic of caption trackas, if you want we can add more support together , I have added translation details for example. https://github.com/jamesjara/php-transcript-youtube-api-and-xml-parser/blob/master/example/test.php — jamesjara, Jan 04 '17 at 08:51
Seems to not work on automatically transcripted videos... :( ! So probably the way is using the Youtube API 3 with key — gtamborero, Jan 31 '21 at 00:16

score 6 · Answer 5 · answered Jan 31 '21 at 00:52

6

Probably the best way is using Youtube API 3. I'm trying it but you need an API key + OAuth 2.0 user. A fast solution is using captionsgrabber and parsing the returned HTML data.

Use example:

https://www.captionsgrabber.com/8302/get-captions.00.php?id=UJTY7ilwSq4

// Where the id is the youtube video id

answered Jan 31 '21 at 00:52

gtamborero

2,898
27
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I tried using v3 but it is giving 403 error. After reading some blogs , I came to know that YouTube won't allow you to download others caption . You can only download yours . Correct me if I'm wrong – Manoj Bhat May 31 '23 at 13:19
Invalid link (it links to "404 not found" page) – Rodrigo De Almeida Siqueira Aug 12 '23 at 20:38

How to get "transcript" in youtube-api v3

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