When attending a course on YouTube or watching a recipe video, sometimes you want to save the spoken content as text for future reference … but typing it all yourself is too much of a headache. If you get stuck in this situation, there are two things you can do: you can use YouTube’s transcription mode to manually copy and paste relevant portions of the YouTube video into your notes, or you can download the entire video transcript (i.e. its subtitles) . in a single file for reference later.
How to Copy YouTube Subtitles Manually
When you try to copy the text from the subtitles it doesn’t work. The trick is to open up YouTube’s transcription view. After the YouTube video opens, click the three dot Menu Button under the title and select the buttonOpen transcript” Possibility.
The Transcript section shows you all of the subtitle text, but with the timestamps. Click on the three dots Menu Button and select “Toggle time stamp“Option. You can change the language using the drop-down menu below.
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Now all you see is a sea of text. Just highlight the text, copy and paste it into the app of your choice.
After pasting the text, you will notice that it was not pasted in paragraph format. You have to go in manually and remove the line breaks. This is of course a bit of extra work, but it is much easier than entering all of the text yourself.
How to download full transcripts on YouTube
If you want to save the entire transcript of a YouTube video, a third-party tool is a better option, and YouTube subtitle downloader from DVDVideoSoftSoft will do the trick. Just open the website, paste the youtube video link, click “Download“And the site will download the subtitle in a text file.
Alternatively, you can scroll down the page to view the transcription text (where you can quickly copy certain text). Again, you will need to manually remove the page breaks after downloading the file. However, once that is done, the entire transcript of the YouTube video is saved for later use. Now just use your favorite note taking app to annotate, add more information or pictures, and build on the transcript. Not sure which note taking app to use? Try our list of best note-taking apps.
