yt-transcript-cli

Fetch YouTube video and playlist transcripts from the command line.

Installation

Install from PyPI:
pypi.org/project/yt-transcript-cli/

pip install yt-transcript-cli

Troubleshooting: pip install not working

On some systems (especially macOS), pip install may fail or the installed command may not be available on your PATH. This is because modern Python environments restrict installing packages globally to avoid conflicts with system packages.

Use pipx instead, which installs CLI tools in isolated environments:

brew install pipx   # macOS
pipx install yt-transcript-cli

Install from GitHub

pip install git+https://github.com/kirinmurphy/youtube-transcript-cli.git

Or install locally for development:

git clone https://github.com/kirinmurphy/youtube-transcript-cli.git
cd youtube-transcript-cli
pip install -e .

Usage

After installation, the yt-transcript-cli command is available.

Single video

yt-transcript-cli "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID"

Multiple videos

yt-transcript-cli "URL1" "URL2" "URL3"

Playlist

yt-transcript-cli "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAYLIST_ID"

Public and unlisted playlists are supported. Private playlists are not accessible.

From a file

yt-transcript-cli -f urls.txt

Where urls.txt contains one URL per line. Lines starting with # are ignored.

Interactive mode

yt-transcript-cli -i

Or just run with no arguments:

yt-transcript-cli

This opens a REPL where you can paste URLs one at a time, then press Enter on an empty line to process them all.

REPL commands

Command	Description
/help, /h	Show help
/status, /s	Show pending URLs
/clear, /c	Clear pending URLs
/process, /p	Process pending URLs
/quit, /q	Exit

Options

Flag	Description	Default
-o, --output-dir	Output directory for transcript files	. (current directory)
-l, --lang	Language code (e.g., en, es)	auto-detect
-q, --quiet	Suppress progress messages	off
-d, --delay	Seconds between requests (rate limiting)	1.5
-f, --file	Read URLs from a file	-
-i, --interactive	Force interactive REPL mode	-

Supported URL formats

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID
• https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID
• https://youtube.com/shorts/VIDEO_ID
• https://youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID
• https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAYLIST_ID
• Plain video ID (11 characters)

Behavior

• Transcripts are saved as transcript_{VIDEO_ID}.txt in the output directory
• Existing transcripts are skipped automatically (won't re-download)
• Playlists are expanded to individual videos
• A rate limit delay is applied between requests (configurable with -d)
• Output is a single continuous block of text (no line breaks between segments)

Use as a library

from yt_transcript import fetch_transcript, to_text, parse_youtube_url

video_id = parse_youtube_url("https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID")
segments = fetch_transcript(video_id)
text = to_text(segments)

Available functions

Function	Description
parse_youtube_url(url)	Extract video ID from a YouTube URL
fetch_transcript(video_id, lang=None)	Fetch transcript segments
to_text(segments)	Convert segments to plain text
is_playlist_url(url)	Check if a URL contains a playlist
fetch_playlist_video_ids(url)	Get all video IDs from a playlist