Youtube Captions scraper

Fetch youtube user submitted or fallback to auto-generated captions

Installation

• npm install -S youtube-captions-scraper OR
• yarn add youtube-captions-scraper

Usage

// ES6 / TypeScript
import { getSubtitles } from 'youtube-captions-scraper'

getSubtitles({
  videoID: 'XXXXX', // youtube video id
  lang: 'fr' // default: `en`
}).then(captions => {
  console.log(captions)
});

// ES5
var getSubtitles = require('youtube-captions-scraper').getSubtitles;

getSubtitles({
  videoID: 'XXXXX', // youtube video id
  lang: 'fr' // default: `en`
}).then(function(captions) {
  console.log(captions);
});

Output

v2 change: Captions will be an array of object of this format:

"videoID": "9W0Dy1nM-zU",
"lang": "en",
"datePull": 1587948820739,
"timedtext": [
  {
    "s": 11.5,
    "d": 4,
    "t": "<b>Bold</b>"
  },
etc...

Key:

• videoID = YouTube's unique id after v= in URL querry string
• lang = language code of captions
• datePull = seconds stamp when the captions was pulled & processed
• timedtext array = start time, duration, & text

CLI

node cli VIDEO-ID

Outputs in home dir as VIDEO-ID.captions.json.
The .gitignore prevents you from saving the output in your git repo.