Transcripts

Read, search, export and batch-pull any video's captions. No key, no quota, no AI.

Transcripts are the one feature with no AI, no key, no server and no cap. Every video row has a Transcript button that reads that video's own captions in your browser and shows them, timestamped and searchable.

Reading one video

1
Click Transcript on a video row. If you already have that video open in a tab, it's read in place; otherwise a hidden, muted tab opens, is read, and closes itself.
2
The captions appear with a timestamp per line. Search filters them; on the video you're currently watching, clicking a timestamp seeks the player.
3
Download it as txt, srt, md or json, or copy the whole thing.

No course needed

On a watch page for a channel you haven't coursified, the panel shows a This video card, under the Coursify button, carrying the same Transcript button. Since transcripts are free and uncapped anyway, this simply means any YouTube video is one click from its captions — and the result is cached against that video, so it's already there if you coursify the channel later. One video, no course →

Format	Best for
`txt`	Plain reading, pasting into notes or another AI tool.
`srt`	Subtitle files — video editors, re-uploads, translation tools.
`md`	Markdown with timestamps as headings; good for note apps.
`json`	Structured segments with start times — for scripts and tooling.

Batch: a whole course at once

Above the course map is a batch card. Point it at the entire course or a single discipline and it pulls every transcript in turn, showing a running “12 of 87” count.

It runs in the extension's background worker, so you can close the popup and it keeps going.
When it finishes, export everything as one combined file or as separate files per video. (SRT has no multi-video form, so a combined SRT export falls back to Markdown.)
Nothing is re-fetched: videos already in your cache are skipped instantly.

It pairs with Overviews

Building an Overview reads the captions anyway, so it fills the transcript cache as a side effect — the Transcript button lights up and opens instantly afterwards. The reverse holds too: batch-pull a course's transcripts and its Overviews then generate with no extraction step at all.

Where they're stored, and pruning

Transcripts live in your browser's extension storage, shared across the popup and the panel. They're the only thing CoursifyYT stores in bulk (a long video runs 50–100 KB), so they clean up after themselves — oldest first:

Bound	Value
Age	Nothing older than 60 days survives
Count	At most 500 stored transcripts
Size	At most 20 MB of transcript text
Grace period	Anything fetched in the last 6 hours is never evicted

The grace period is what keeps a long batch intact until you've exported it. Pruning only ever touches transcripts — your progress, overviews, courses, history and settings are never affected.

When there's no transcript

The video has no captions. Nothing to read — try an Overview, which can fall back to watching the video.
Auto-generated captions are off for that video. Some creators disable them; YouTube then has nothing to serve.
Age-restricted or region-blocked videos can't be read in a hidden tab. Open the video yourself first, then click Transcript — it will read the tab you already have.