How to download YouTube subtitles (SRT, VTT or TXT)

The fast way: paste a link, pick a format

Most YouTube videos already carry a caption track — either ones the creator uploaded or YouTube's own auto-generated captions. A subtitle downloader reads that existing track and saves it as a file. Nothing is re-transcribed, nothing is downloaded from the video itself, so it's instant and free.

With Nova's free subtitle downloader you paste the video URL, choose the caption language, and pick your format — SRT, WebVTT, or plain text. The file builds in your browser and downloads straight to your machine. No signup, no extension, no upload.

SRT vs VTT vs plain text — which to pick

The right format depends on what you're doing with the captions. All three carry the same words; they differ in how (and whether) timing is encoded.

• SRT — the universal subtitle format. Every video editor, player, and platform accepts it. Pick this if you're importing captions into Premiere, Final Cut, Resolve, CapCut, or uploading them back to a video.
• WebVTT (.vtt) — the web-native format for HTML5 <track> captions. Pick this if you're putting the video on a website or webapp.
• Plain text (.txt) — just the words, no timestamps. Pick this if you want to read, quote, translate, or repurpose what was said.

Auto-generated captions count too

If a creator never uploaded a subtitle file, you can usually still grab YouTube's auto-generated captions — the ones the platform produces with speech recognition. They're not always perfectly punctuated, but for most spoken-word videos they're accurate enough to edit, search, or repurpose. If a video genuinely has no captions of any kind, no tool can download them; you'd have to transcribe the audio yourself.

Pick the caption language before you fetch. A video can carry captions in several languages, and you'll get whichever track matches your choice when it exists.

A note on copyright

Downloading a video's captions for your own reference, editing, accessibility, or translation work is routine. Republishing someone else's content as your own is not. Use subtitles the way you'd use any source material — to caption your own uploads, to quote accurately, to make content accessible, or to work faster — and credit creators when you build on their work.

From captions to clips

Subtitles are often step one. The reason most people pull a transcript or caption file is that they're about to do something with the video — cut it down, repurpose it, post it elsewhere. That's exactly what Nova does next: it takes the same long video and turns its best moments into captioned, reframed, ready-to-post vertical clips automatically.

So if you're downloading subtitles to find the good parts of a video, skip a step — Nova finds them and cuts them for you, captions burned in, in minutes. The subtitle downloader is free; clipping is free to start.