A yt-dlp alternative when all you need is the transcript
yt-dlp downloads almost anything, and for that it has no real alternative. But if you run it on a server only to get subtitles, you are taking on blocking, cookies and proxies for a few kilobytes of text.
Side by side
| yt-dlp on your server | Transkrio API | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free software; you pay for proxies and your time | 100 free credits, then from $9 for 3,000 |
| Cloud server IPs | Often blocked ("Sign in to confirm you're not a bot") | Works from anywhere |
| Cookies or Google account | Often needed on servers | Not needed |
| Videos without captions | Download the audio and run your own speech-to-text | Transcribed for you, 1 credit / minute |
| Podcasts (RSS, Apple) | Partly, by downloading audio | Yes, publisher transcripts used when they exist |
| Output | Subtitle files to parse (VTT, SRT, JSON3) | Clean JSON segments, text, markdown, SRT, VTT |
| Batches, channels, playlists | Yes, with your own loop and retries | Yes, 50 per call; failures are free |
| Video and audio files | Yes | No |
| Hundreds of other sites | Yes | YouTube, TikTok, Instagram Reels, podcasts |
| Upkeep when YouTube changes | Update and redeploy | Ours |
Keep yt-dlp if
- You need the video or audio file, not just the words.
- You need sites other than YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and podcasts.
- It runs on your own machine, where YouTube rarely blocks you.
Use a transcript API if
- Your code runs on AWS, GCP, Azure, a VPS or serverless, and you only need text for an LLM, search or analytics.
- Some of your videos have no captions and you don't want to run speech-to-text yourself.
- You'd rather not tie a Google account to a scraper.
Switching
Replace the yt-dlp subtitle step with one request: GET https://api.transkrio.com/v1/transcript?url=... with your key in x-api-key. Code in Python and Node.js. Stuck on the bot check right now? See how to fix "Sign in to confirm you're not a bot".
Try it with 100 free credits
No card needed. Failed requests are free and unused credits roll over.
Get free API key