Hello, may I ask how you can pull off that youtube magic you've mentioned?
So you want to download an entire playlist off youtube and the subtitles too
Maybe just the subtitles? Maybe just in one language? Maybe don’t want to pay for Youtube Red but want the download option
It’s actually really easy.
You need the youtube-dl tool. It’s command line, works for unix/windows/mac etc, and it’s not scary at all. I’m going to lay out how to do this in windows, but once you have that command window open the instructions are basically the same.
Step 1: Download youtube-dl (the exe version, for windows)
Step 2: Put it in an empty directory (you don’t have to. You can run it right out of downloads, but it’s just less messy this way.)
Step 3: go to the directory where you’ve put your youtube-dl.exe file, hold down the SHIFT key, right click anywhere empty, and choose “Open PowerShell window here”.
Step 4: Now, here’s the easy part. Just copy and paste these commands in and press enter. I’ll give you a few examples, just replace the replace_this_with_your_playlist_url with the playlist url:
1. Download every video in the playlist with English subtitles
./youtube-dl –write-sub –sub-lang en,en-GB –ignore-errors -o ’%(title)s.%(ext)s’ replace_this_with_your_playlist_url
2. Download all the English subtitles in the playlist without the videos
./youtube-dl –write-sub –sub-lang en,en-GB –skip-download –ignore-errors -o ’%(title)s.%(ext)s’ replace_this_with_your_playlist_url
3. Download all the videos in the playlist, no subtitles
./youtube-dl –ignore-errors -o ’%(title)s.%(ext)s’ replace_this_with_your_playlist_urlThe files will end up right in that empty folder you threw the exe in. The basic format of the subtitles are .vtt files, which VLC has no problem picking up and using. They’ll be named title.language_of_sub.vtt, and the videos will just be the title.mp4. (Whatever extension it was uploaded in, I think) Youtube-dl will download at the highest quality by default.
Here’s a few notes and extra parameters to change:
the –ignore-errors parameter is there to prevent the script from stopping when you hit a private video or a video that you can’t view in your region
if you take out -o ’%(title)s.%(ext)s’, the filenames will be title_videoID.mp4
instead of en,en-GB you can use any of these iso codes for other languages
replace –sub-lang en,en-GB with –all-subs and it’ll download all the subs
replace –write-sub with –write-auto-sub and you get automatically generated subtitles. You follow this with the same choosing language parameter. I use this to translate simplified Chinese to traditional.
you can put in a single video link instead of a playlist url and it’ll run the command for just one vid.
the ./ is at the front of the command line because we’re using windows powershell, and that’s how you tell it to “use this directory”. I don’t know what that should be in other operating systems.
They have pretty good documentation if you want to dig in for more options.
It pulled 265 subs for me in less than 10 minutes.
