yt

A small command-line tool to get a YouTube video's transcript — no API key, no OAuth. Also does metadata, downloads, and an LLM-analysis bundle (see yt help).

Install

cargo install yt

Get a transcript

yt transcript "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqbyysExjfU"

[0:01] Good evening, YouTube. This is Ramesh
[0:03] Sheriff with another video log.
[0:05] Okay, guys. After
...

Accepts a full URL, a youtu.be/… link, or a bare video ID. Timestamps are shown by default — add --no-timestamps for plain text.

A few handy variants:

yt transcript "<url>" --no-timestamps        # plain text, no timestamps
yt transcript "<url>" --format srt > subs.srt # subtitle file
yt transcript "<url>" --format json           # machine-readable (start/duration per line)
yt transcript "<url>" --lang es               # pick a caption language

Tip: always quote the URL (the ?/& confuse the shell otherwise).

Other features

yt can also fetch metadata, download video/audio, extract frames, and build an LLM-ready bundle. Run:

yt help
yt help transcript    # detailed flags for any subcommand

Quick tour: yt info (metadata), yt download / yt audio (needs yt-dlp + ffmpeg), yt analyze (transcript + metadata as JSON), yt search / comments / channel / playlist (need a YouTube Data API key via yt config set api-key <KEY>).

Every command supports --format json (result on stdout, errors on stderr) for scripting and agents.

License

MIT