CODEWITHSUNDEEP
youtubeyoutube-api
Peter Olson
Peter Olson

Reputation: 142939

Extracting subtitles from YouTube videos no longer works

Until today I was using this URL to get captions from YouTube videos:

https://video.google.com/timedtext?lang=${lang}&v=${id}

For example https://video.google.com/timedtext?lang=zh&v=rIZNQwCfeig.

This was always working before, but as of today it started returning a blank response.

Did the API change recently? Is there a new way to get captions from YouTube videos?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 926

Answers (1)

Limon Monte
Limon Monte

Reputation: 54409

Unfortunately, there are no signs that this API will get back to life.

I ended up using youtube-dl instead:

youtube-dl --write-sub --sub-lang $LANG_CODE --skip-download --sub-format ttml \
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=$YOUTUBE_ID

This will save captions in ttml format to a file, you'll need to read its content and delete that file manually. It is a bit more complicated than before, but still much easier than using the official YouTube Captions API.

Upvotes: 2

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