Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about downloading YouTube subtitles
It's a free online tool that lets you download subtitles/captions from any public YouTube video in multiple formats (SRT, VTT, TXT). Paste a YouTube URL and download the subtitles instantly. It's made by LunaNotes, and it runs one step of that app on its own.
LunaNotes is an AI note-taking app. You bring a source — a video, a PDF, an audio file, a meeting, or your own writing — and it produces a structured note you can edit, plus diagrams, flashcards and an AI chat built from that note. YouTube is one of the places a source can come from, not the whole product. This tool exists so you can judge the output before you sign up for anything.
The free plan gives you 100 AI credits a month (roughly 10 notes or 20 diagrams), 100 MB of storage for files you upload, 5 AI diagrams and 5 flashcard decks — no credit card. That's where a caption file stops being raw text and becomes a note: summarised, structured, editable, and searchable next to everything else you're studying.
We support three popular formats: SRT (SubRip) for most video players, VTT (WebVTT) for web browsers and HTML5 video, and TXT (plain text) with timestamps for easy reading.
Download as often as you like — this tool is free and we don't meter it. What an account adds isn't more downloads, it's somewhere for the content to live once you've got it.
No. The tool works without an account and there's no credit card anywhere in the flow. An account is what you want when you'd like to turn the transcript into a note you can edit, summarise and study from.
Not all videos have subtitles. Subtitles are available if the creator has added them or if YouTube has auto-generated them. Private videos and some restricted content may not have accessible subtitles.
SRT (SubRip Subtitle) is the most widely used subtitle format. It works with VLC, Windows Media Player, and most video editing software. Simply place the .srt file in the same folder as your video with the same name.
VTT (Web Video Text Tracks) is a subtitle format designed for HTML5 video. It's commonly used for web videos and supports additional styling options.
Yes. All three formats (SRT, VTT, TXT) are plain text files you can open in any editor. If what you actually want is to work with what was said rather than the timings, a free LunaNotes account turns the same video into an editable, structured note instead of a caption file.
This tool downloads the caption track YouTube serves for the video — usually the creator's own captions or YouTube's auto-generated ones — so the language is whatever the video provides. If you need the content in another language, our free summary tool writes summaries in 12+ languages, including Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese.