Guides & Articles
Everything we've learned about YouTube transcripts — how to get them, how to work with them, and why they behave the way they do.
Guides 🛠️
Step-by-step walkthroughs for getting something specific done.
How to Get a Transcript From Any YouTube Video
Every URL format that works, what the 11-character video ID actually is, and how to get clean text out the other side.
7 min readHow to Translate a YouTube Transcript Into Any Language
Switching caption tracks and translating are two different things. Knowing which one you want saves a lot of frustration.
6 min readHow to Turn a YouTube Lecture Into Study Notes
Watching a lecture twice is a poor substitute for taking notes once. Here's a workflow that produces something you can actually revise from.
8 min readHow to Turn Your YouTube Video Into a Blog Post
A transcript is not an article. Here's the editing work that sits between them, and why skipping it shows.
8 min readTranscribing Long Videos, Podcasts and Lectures
A four-hour podcast produces tens of thousands of words. The extraction is the easy part — making it usable is the work.
7 min read
Articles 📚
Explainers on how captions and transcripts actually work under the hood.
Auto-Generated vs. Manual Captions: What Actually Differs
One is a document someone wrote. The other is a stream of guesses from a speech recogniser. The gap shows up everywhere.
6 min readWhy YouTube Transcripts Have No Punctuation
It isn't an oversight. Punctuation is a separate prediction problem from recognising words, and the segments break on clock time rather than grammar.
5 min readTranscript vs. Subtitles vs. Closed Captions
Three words, three different jobs. The distinction matters as soon as you need a file rather than just text.
6 min readHow YouTube Transcript Timestamps Actually Work
Every line carries a start time and a duration. Once you know that, a lot of transcript oddities stop being mysterious.
5 min readWhy Some YouTube Videos Have No Transcript
There are only a handful of reasons, and each one tells you something different about whether it's worth trying again.
6 min read
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