yt-transcript

A fast YouTube transcript downloader. Grabs transcripts directly from YouTube's internal API and saves them as plain text files. No API key needed.

Install as a Claude Code Skill

npx skills add alexdobrenko/yt-transcript -g -y

Then use it in Claude Code:

/yt-transcript https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

Manual Usage

Dependencies

• libcurl - HTTP requests
• cJSON - JSON parsing

Install them:

# macOS
brew install cjson curl

# Linux (Debian/Ubuntu)
sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev libcjson-dev

Build

make

Run

./youtube_transcript <video_id> [language_code]

The transcript saves to the current directory as {video_title}.txt.

Examples:

./youtube_transcript dQw4w9WgXcQ en
./youtube_transcript dQw4w9WgXcQ es    # Spanish

How It Works

Uses YouTube's internal iOS client API (get_transcript endpoint) to fetch transcript data. Constructs the same protobuf-encoded request that the YouTube iOS app makes, so it works without authentication or API keys.