Ever find yourself thinking “I should really catch up on [insert favorite YouTuber here]”, only to remember you don’t have time to sit through hours of video content? Yeah, same here.
So I built a tool.
🎯 The Problem:
Sometimes I want the content of a video, not the video itself. Especially for creators I follow who do commentary, education, or long-form analysis — I don’t need visuals, I need words. And YouTube’s transcript feature is great… until you try to use it across multiple videos.
💡 The Solution:
I wrote a Python app that lets you paste in a YouTube link — be it a single video, a playlist, or a whole channel — and it pulls down the transcripts for you automatically. It’s got a simple graphical interface and a batch mode that saves all transcripts from a session into a single text file, so you can scroll through your backlog like you’re binge-reading newsletters.
You can find it here:
👉 https://github.com/jonwestfall/youtube-transcript-download
✨ Use Cases:
- Skim through that playlist of lectures you meant to watch three months ago
- Read commentary from your favorite political or cultural analyst while offline
- Search for that one quote in a video without guessing the timestamp
- Feed transcripts into your own personal LLM or summarizer if you’re into that sort of thing (I am)
⚙️ How It Works:
- Open the app
- Paste in a URL (video, playlist, or channel)
- Select how many videos to process (for playlists and channels)
- Let it run in the background — it’s threaded so it won’t freeze
- Boom: transcripts saved as
.txtfiles in your working folder
Each transcript is saved individually, but also combined into a single batch file with a timestamp so you can scroll them all at once. Or load them into an LLM for summarization!
No YouTube API key needed, no login, no nonsense.