Paste a YouTube link and download the captions the video already publishes — as a plain transcript, or as timed SRT/VTT subtitles.
YouTube already publishes a caption track for most videos — creator-uploaded when there is one, auto-generated otherwise. Reading that track takes seconds and costs nothing, where transcribing the audio from scratch means downloading the video and running a speech model over it.
Take a plain .txt transcript for reading, summarising or pasting into a document, or timed .srt / .vtt cues for an editor, a re-upload or a translation pass.
If a video publishes no caption track at all, you are told so and pointed at the transcription tool, rather than being quietly charged for a speech-to-text run you did not ask for.
Launch the ViralMint desktop app, open Tools, and choose Transcript Downloader.
Paste the full YouTube link. Nothing is downloaded except the caption file itself.
Leave it on Auto to take whatever the video publishes, or pick a specific language. If that language isn't available, ViralMint tells you which one it used instead.
TXT for the plain words, SRT for standard timed subtitles, VTT for the web flavour.
Click Get transcript. The file is ready in seconds and saved to your machine.
Yes. Reading a caption track costs nothing to run — there is no speech model involved and no video is downloaded — so the tool is free with no credit usage.
Then this tool cannot help, and it says so rather than falling back to something billable. For those videos use ViralMint's Whisper transcription instead, which downloads the audio and transcribes it locally.
They are usable but imperfect — expect missing punctuation, run-on sentences and occasional misheard proper nouns, because that is what YouTube produced. Creator-uploaded captions are preferred automatically when a video has them.
Yes. Choose SRT or VTT and each line keeps its start and end time. The TXT option strips the timing and gives you just the words.
Videos that require a sign-in generally will not resolve. Public and unlisted videos with a caption track work.
The YouTube Transcript Downloader ships inside the free ViralMint desktop app — no subscription, no watermark, no per-minute cap. Download once, use on as many videos as you want.
