How to download youtube autogenerated captions without yt-dlp?

Question

There are many ways to download youtube captions, but they do not work for autogenerated captions.

I can download autogenerated captions with yt-dlp, for example:

yt-dlp --skip-download --write-subs --write-auto-subs --sub-langs "ru-en" -P "/Users/user/Downloads" "https://youtu.be/PkZNo7MFNFg"

But how to do it without yt-dlp?

Answer 1

I don't know if you don't want to use yt-dlp at all or if you don't want to use it just for downloading. You can use yt-dlp to find the download address and then download the subtitles either with your browser or with wget, for example. To determine the URL, you must use the --dump-json option which allows you to obtain all the information from the video.

yt-dlp --write-auto-subs "https://youtu.be/PkZNo7MFNFg" --dump-json > info.json

Edit this file, and go to the automatic_captions section, then ru-en and there you have the 5 download addresses for the 5 available formats. For example for the vtt format:

https://www.youtube.com/api/timedtext?v=PkZNo7MFNFg&ei=AsvXZdHVEo6zp-oPmtyE2AE&caps=asr&opi=112496729&xoaf=5&hl=en&ip=0.0.0.0&ipbits=0&expire=1708666226&sparams=ip%2Cipbits%2Cexpire%2Cv%2Cei%2Ccaps%2Copi%2Cxoaf&signature=09860E14932DDDAB486742638E9A499216DE19AE.B300E3CDF4AC749907DF14051439C79790542CC1&key=yt8&lang=en&tlang=ru-en&fmt=vtt

You can download it with wget:

wget "https://www.youtube.com/api/timedtext?v=PkZNo7MFNFg&ei=AsvXZdHVEo6zp-oPmtyE2AE&caps=asr&opi=112496729&xoaf=5&hl=en&ip=0.0.0.0&ipbits=0&expire=1708666226&sparams=ip%2Cipbits%2Cexpire%2Cv%2Cei%2Ccaps%2Copi%2Cxoaf&signature=09860E14932DDDAB486742638E9A499216DE19AE.B300E3CDF4AC749907DF14051439C79790542CC1&key=yt8&lang=en&tlang=ru-en&fmt=vtt"

or directly in the browser.