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.

Originally published as GitHub Gist #43ac4b08ecc729cda15f7d4487241efd