How to Get YouTube Transcripts in PHP (and Laravel)

Fetch a transcript with cURL

Create a free key in the dashboard (100 transcripts, no card) and keep it in an environment variable. Pass any YouTube URL or a bare video ID.

<?php
$query = http_build_query(['url' => 'https://youtu.be/5f3Pn-N6yLc']);
$ch = curl_init("https://transcript-yt.com/v1/transcript?$query");
curl_setopt_array($ch, [
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
    CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => ['Authorization: Bearer ' . getenv('TRANSCRIPTYT_KEY')],
    CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 120,
]);
$body = curl_exec($ch);
$status = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_RESPONSE_CODE);
curl_close($ch);

$data = json_decode($body, true);
if ($status !== 200) {
    throw new RuntimeException($data['error']['code'] . ': ' . $data['error']['message']);
}

echo $data['title'], PHP_EOL;
foreach (array_slice($data['segments'], 0, 3) as $seg) {
    printf("%7.1fs  %s\n", $seg['start'], $seg['text']);
}

Laravel

Laravel's HTTP client keeps it to one call. Put the key in .env as TRANSCRIPTYT_KEY and read it through config in production.

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Http;

$data = Http::withToken(env('TRANSCRIPTYT_KEY'))
    ->timeout(120)
    ->get('https://transcript-yt.com/v1/transcript', ['url' => '5f3Pn-N6yLc'])
    ->throw()
    ->json();

$text = collect($data['segments'])->pluck('text')->implode(' ');

Subtitle files and translation

Set format to srt, vtt, text, csv, or md to get the file body directly. Add translate_to with a language code to translate any track into one of 150+ languages with the timings kept.

$srt = Http::withToken(env('TRANSCRIPTYT_KEY'))
    ->get('https://transcript-yt.com/v1/transcript', [
        'url' => '5f3Pn-N6yLc',
        'format' => 'srt',
        'translate_to' => 'es',
    ])
    ->throw()
    ->body();

file_put_contents('captions.es.srt', $srt);

Errors

Errors use one envelope, {"error": {"code", "message"}}. Retry BLOCKED, RATE_LIMITED, and UPSTREAM_ERROR with backoff; VIDEO_UNAVAILABLE, NO_CAPTIONS, and LANGUAGE_NOT_AVAILABLE are final. Failed requests are never billed. The full list is in the docs.