Is YouTubeForge free to use?

Yes. No account, no sign-up. Public YouTube captions are extracted as-is. Ads may appear around the tool.

How do I access the transcript after generating it?

Every result lives on the home URL with v= and mode=text. Optional query params: lang, tlang, and mode (audio, translate, summary, srt).

Can I download the transcript?

Yes. Download TXT, SRT, VTT, Markdown with timestamp links, or JSON from the transcript download page. Copy and Copy Markdown are also available.

How do I transcribe a YouTube video?

Paste a public watch link, Short, or youtu.be URL. YouTubeForge loads the caption track YouTube already published and shows it as searchable text. It does not run speech-to-text on the audio.

Is there a limit to the length of the video?

Captions have no extra length cap. Video: about 4 hours at 360p, 3 hours at 480p, 90 min at 720p, 60 min at 1080p+. Audio: about 3 hours.

Legal

Privacy

YouTubeForge is a no-account tool. We do not create user profiles, and we do not sell a list of the videos you paste.

What we process

When you paste a YouTube link we send that video id to YouTube’s public player and caption endpoints so we can show the transcript, audio, or subtitle file. Rate limits use your IP for a short window so scrapers cannot drain captions through this app.

Audio and video downloads ask your browser to solve a short local proof-of-work, then we issue a cookie ticket for a few minutes. Shareable transcript links (`/?v=`) do not require that check. We do not send that puzzle to a third-party captcha network. Transcripts you edit stay in the browser until you copy or download them.

What we do not do

No sign-up, no mailing list, no stored library of other people’s videos. We are not affiliated with YouTube or Google. Use downloads only for videos you are allowed to keep a personal copy of.

Advertising

If Google AdSense is enabled, Google and its partners may set cookies or use similar identifiers to show ads and measure them. See Google’s advertising policies and Ad Settings. Publisher ads.txt is served at /ads.txt when a publisher id is configured.

Browser extension

The optional Chrome extension can fetch captions in your browser and open the result on this website. It does not show Google AdSense inside the popup. Ads stay on these pages.

Analytics

If GA4_ID, PLAUSIBLE_DOMAIN, or META_PIXEL_ID is set on the server, page views (and Meta ad attribution when the Pixel is on) are measured so we can see which landings and ads work. When PRIVATE_PIXEL_TOKEN is also set, ViewContent for transcript pages (`?v=`) is sent to Meta’s Conversions API as well as the browser Pixel, using the same event id so Meta can dedupe. Scripts load after engagement or idle so they do not block first paint. No account on this site either way. Meta’s data policy: facebook.com/privacy/policy.

Contact

Questions: open an issue on GitHub (set CONTACT_EMAIL on the server to show a mailbox). Terms.