This YouTube subtitle downloader pulls the captions from a video and hands them to you as a standard .srt file. Paste a video link into Y-Download and every subtitle track YouTube has for it is listed: subtitles the creator uploaded, auto-generated captions produced by YouTube's speech recognition, and the automatic translations of those captions, which often cover dozens of languages. Pick a language, click Download and the file is saved under the video's title.
SRT is the simplest subtitle format there is – numbered cues, a start and end time, the text – and that is why it works almost everywhere. Load it in VLC to watch a downloaded MP4 with subtitles, import it into Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve or Final Cut to add captions to an edit, or open it in Notepad, Word or Google Docs to read it as a transcript. Y-Download keeps YouTube's original timing, and for auto-generated captions it cleans up the overlapping cues they are made of, so each line appears once with a proper start and end time.
People download subtitles to get a transcript of a lecture or interview, to translate a video, to make content accessible, to study a language with the script in hand, or to quote a talk accurately. Two honest caveats: auto-generated captions can misrecognize names, jargon and accents, so proofread anything you publish; and not every video has subtitles – auto captions are missing on some videos, such as music or unsupported languages, and very new uploads may not have them yet. The tool is free, needs no account, and works in any browser on iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac and Linux.