| Date: | 2026-06-01 01:05 |
|---|---|
| category: | Tech |
| tags: | yt-dlp, youtube, subtitles, cli |
| summary: | A one-liner to download auto-generated subtitles from YouTube as SRT files without touching the video. |
Sometimes you need subtitles — for a transcript, for translation, for feeding into some other tool — but you don't want the video itself. yt-dlp handles this cleanly.
One command does it:
yt-dlp --write-auto-sub --convert-subs=srt --skip-download 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uniqueVideoID'
What each flag does:
--write-auto-sub— fetch the auto-generated subtitle track (the one YouTube generates automatically, not the manually uploaded captions)--convert-subs=srt— convert whatever format YouTube spits out (usually VTT) into the widely-supported SRT format--skip-download— don't download the video, just the subtitles
The result is a .srt file sitting next to where you ran the command, named after the video title.
If the video has manually uploaded captions instead of auto-generated ones, swap --write-auto-sub for --write-sub. You can also pass --sub-lang en to pin a specific language when multiple tracks are available.