Getting YouTube auto-transcript from API?

As of Aug 2019 the following method you to download transcripts:

1. Open in Browser

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[Video ID]

2. From Console type:
   JSON.parse(ytplayer.config.args.player_response).captions.playerCaptionsTracklistRenderer.captionTracks[0].baseUrl

1 Install youtube-transcript-api (https://github.com/jdepoix/youtube-transcript-api), e.g.:

pip3 install youtube_transcript_api

2 Create youtube_transcript_api-wrapper.py with the following code (based partially on https://stackoverflow.com/a/65325576/2585501):

from youtube_transcript_api import YouTubeTranscriptApi

#srt = YouTubeTranscriptApi.get_transcript(video_id)

videoListName = "youtubeVideoIDlist.txt"
with open(videoListName) as f:
    video_ids = f.read().splitlines()

transcript_list, unretrievable_videos = YouTubeTranscriptApi.get_transcripts(video_ids, continue_after_error=True)

for video_id in video_ids:

    if video_id in transcript_list.keys():

        print("\nvideo_id = ", video_id)
        #print(transcript)

        srt = transcript_list.get(video_id)

        text_list = []
        for i in srt:
            text_list.append(i['text'])

        text = ' '.join(text_list)
        print(text)

3 Create youtubeVideoIDlist.txt containing a list of video_ids

4 python3 youtube_transcript_api-wrapper.py

You may refer with this thread: How to get "transcript" in youtube-api v3

If you're authenticating with oAuth2, you could do a quick call to this feed:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/[VIDEOID]/captiondata/[CAPTIONTRACKID]

to get the data you want. To retrieve a list of possible caption track IDs with v2 of the API, you access this feed:

https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/[VIDEOID]/captions

That feed request also accepts some optional parameters, including language, max-results, etc. For more details, along with a sample that shows the returned format of the caption track list, see the documentation at https://developers.google.com/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_protocol_captions#Retrieve_Caption_Set

Also, here are some references which migh help:

• https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-way-to-download-the-YouTube-transcripts-that-are-generated-automatically
• http://ccm.net/faq/40644-how-to-get-the-transcript-of-a-youtube-video