About LinkTranscript

LinkTranscript is a free tool that turns a YouTube link into a clean, readable transcript you can search, copy, and export. It is built and run by MirthCode LLC, a small independent software company in Atlanta, Georgia, and maintained by its founder, Lorenzo Suarez.

Why it exists

It started as a tool for one person. I spend a lot of time with long videos: recorded lectures, conference talks, interviews, the occasional two-hour podcast. Reading a transcript takes a quarter of the time that watching does, and it lets you search, quote accurately, and paste the text into whatever you are working in. The tools that existed were either cluttered with popups or made you sign up before you could copy a paragraph. So I built one that does the job and stays out of the way.

That is still the standard for every change we make: paste a link, get the transcript, do what you need with it. No account, no popups before the content, no video downloads.

How it works

YouTube stores captions for most public videos, either uploaded by the creator or generated automatically. LinkTranscript reads that caption track, cleans up the spacing and line breaks, and lays it out with clickable timestamps that jump the embedded player to the right moment. The language of the track is shown above the transcript. When a video has no captions at all, there is nothing to read, and the tool tells you so rather than guessing.

We do not transcribe audio ourselves and we never download the video. The transcript you see is the caption text YouTube already serves, made readable. Exports (TXT, Markdown, SRT, and VTT) include the video title, the source link, the language, and the date, so anything you save stays traceable to where it came from.

What it deliberately does not do

• It is not a YouTube downloader. There is no way to save video or audio here, and there will not be.
• It is not affiliated with YouTube or Google. YouTube is a trademark of Google LLC; we just read the public caption data.
• It does not store your transcripts. They are generated when you ask for them. Popular videos are cached briefly so the same transcript is not fetched over and over, but nothing is tied to you.
• It does not rewrite the speaker's words. What you get is what the captions say. If you want a summary or notes, our guides show how to do that with the AI assistant you already use.

How it is funded

LinkTranscript is free to use and supported by advertising. Ads are placed away from the transcript itself and never as a gate in front of it. Getting a transcript costs us a small amount per video, which is why there is a fair-use limit per hour; it is high enough that normal use never reaches it.

Your content and other people's

Captions belong to whoever made the video. Use transcripts the way you would use any published source: quote, cite, link back, and get permission before republishing someone's work in full. Our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy spell out the details.

Get in touch

Found a video that should work and does not? Have an idea, or a complaint? Use the contact form or email [email protected]. Bug reports with the video link get fixed fastest.