Three files: a cleaned .srt with timings, the original .srt exactly as YouTube serves it, and a plain .txt transcript with no timestamps for pasting into a doc.

What does the cleanup actually change?

Deterministic rules only. It removes bracketed noise like [Music], normalises punctuation spacing, restores sentence casing, drops repeated auto-caption lines, and fixes unambiguous contractions. The wording itself is left alone.

Three videos before it asks for anything. One email then unlocks it permanently, with no card and no per-video cap.

Any public video or Short that has captions, manual or auto-generated, in any language the video offers. Private, deleted, and captions-disabled videos have nothing to fetch.

Free tool · 3 free, then your email

YouTube transcript downloader

Pull any public video’s captions as a tidy .srt or plain transcript, cleaned but never rewritten.

Manual or auto-generated captions, in any language the video has.

A transcript is the cheapest raw material you own. One video already holds the shorts script, the newsletter, the blog post, the chapter markers, and the description, all locked inside a caption track. This pulls that track from any public video and hands it back in the two formats that are actually useful: an .srt with timings for editing and re-uploading, and a flat .txt for writing from.

Raw auto-captions are unusable as-is. They arrive in lowercase, split mid-sentence, littered with [Music] and repeated lines. The cleanup pass here is rules-based, so nothing gets reworded on the way through. It removes the noise cues, restores sentence casing, spaces the punctuation properly, drops duplicate lines, and fixes contractions that are unambiguous in English. Toggle any of it off and the file rebuilds instantly.

Use it on your own back catalogue before a repurposing run, or on a competitor’s video when you want to study how they structure a hook. Paste a watch URL, a youtu.be link, or a Shorts link.

Frequently asked questions

What do I get back?: Three files: a cleaned .srt with timings, the original .srt exactly as YouTube serves it, and a plain .txt transcript with no timestamps for pasting into a doc.
What does the cleanup actually change?: Deterministic rules only. It removes bracketed noise like [Music], normalises punctuation spacing, restores sentence casing, drops repeated auto-caption lines, and fixes unambiguous contractions. The wording itself is left alone.
Is it really free?: Three videos before it asks for anything. One email then unlocks it permanently, with no card and no per-video cap.
Which videos work?: Any public video or Short that has captions, manual or auto-generated, in any language the video offers. Private, deleted, and captions-disabled videos have nothing to fetch.

This tool lives inside Chewbr

Chewbr does transcript pulls and caption cleanup, plus the other 46 jobs between filmed and published.

The full app is the finishing system for YouTubers: every video gets a 47-step checklist from Plan to Promote, with tools like this one built into the step where you need them. It has not launched yet, so join the waitlist and you will be first through the door.