YTSAPI (YouTube Transcribe API) for The Abuse Project is a python API (Application Programming Interface) which allows you to get the transcript/subtitle for a given YouTube video in a nice list consisting of dictionaries. It also works for videos which have automatically generated subtitles. It does not use any hacky mechanisms.
For using this library in your project, simple use pip to install the module.
pip install ytsapi
The module published is in it's early stage as of now, as it's being used internally in The Abuse Project. If you want to develop it further, you'll have to use this source repository.
git clone https://github.com/theabuseproject/YTSAPI.git
After cloning, install the dependencies using pip,
pip install -r requirements.txt
The implemented API class can be found under ytsapi/ytsapi.py.
import ytsapi
ytsapi.YTSAPI.get_transcript("Youtube Video ID")>>> import ytsapi
>>> video = 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaW_jenozKc'
>>> video_id = video.split('?v=')[1]
>>> video_subtitles = ytsapi.YTSAPI.get_transcript(video_id)
>>> print(video_subtitles)
[{'text': 'This a test video\nfor youtube-dl', 'start': 0.26, 'duration': 3.33}, {'text': 'For more information\ncontact phihag@phihag.de', 'start': 3.59, 'duration': 6.08}]
>>>
>>> type(video_subtitles)
<class 'list'>
>>> type(video_subtitles[0])
<class 'dict'>
>>>>>> import ytsapi
>>> ytsapi.YTSAPI.get_video('BaW_jenozKc')
YoutubeDL - Starting the download (BaW_jenozKc)
[youtube] BaW_jenozKc: Downloading webpage
[youtube] BaW_jenozKc: Downloading video info webpage
WARNING: Unable to extract video title
[download] BaW_jenozKc.mp4 has already been downloaded
[download] 100% of 1.74MiB
[youtube] BaW_jenozKc: Downloading webpage
[youtube] BaW_jenozKc: Downloading video info webpage
WARNING: Unable to extract video title
[download] BaW_jenozKc.mp4 has already been downloaded
[download] 100% of 1.74MiB
YoutubeDL - Writing video in current working directory.
YoutubeDL - Done.
>>>