8.2k stars · MIT · v1.2.4 (2026-01-29) · Track this in Scout
Fetches any YouTube video's subtitles with no API key and no quota — competitor research as plain text, tonight.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
A small Python library that fetches the subtitle track of any YouTube video, including the automatically generated ones, and can ask YouTube to translate it on the way. It needs no API key and no headless browser, and it has both a Python interface and a command-line tool.
What it is good for. Edition 3 covered python-youtube for titles and view counts, which tells you that a competitor's video did well. This tells you what was in it — and it is the cheaper of the two by a distance, because it burns none of the 10,000-unit daily API quota. Pull the transcripts of the fifty most-viewed videos in a niche, hand the pile to a language model, and ask what nobody has explained properly yet. That is a content calendar built in an evening from evidence rather than instinct, and the same transcripts double as keyword seeds for OpenSEO and advertools. It also works on your own back catalogue when you want the text of a video nobody wrote a script for.
- Free, no key, no quota, no OAuth consent screen — genuinely a twenty-minute win
- Handles auto-generated captions and can return translated tracks, so Russian-language competitors are in scope too
- MIT and tiny, so it drops into a FastAPI virtual environment without a dependency fight
- It uses an unofficial endpoint. YouTube can change it, and the library then needs an update before it works again
- YouTube blocks datacentre IP ranges aggressively — run it from a home or office machine, because from a datacentre server you will need a proxy (the library supports them, but that is a paid service)
- Transcripts only. Views, retention and click-through still come from the API or from Studio
pip install youtube-transcript-api
