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I was wondering is there a way to download a Youtube videos with 2 or more Subtitles using Youtube-DL and ignore auto-generated subtitles?

Timothy Robert
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1 Answers1

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TL;DR

Is there a way to download a Youtube video with 2 or more subtitles using youtuble-dl and ignore auto-generated subtitles?

Yes. Use the --sub-lang option to specify the subtitle language(s) you are interested in, as implied in the chosen answer to this Super User question. Alternatively, you could also use the --all-subs option.

I'm trying to get 2+ subs of a YouTube video, that tutorial was only for 1 subtitle.

Referencing the official documentation for youtube-dl, the --sub-lang option takes:

Languages of the subtitles to download (optional) separated by commas, use --list-subs for available language tags

Practical Examples

Using this historical K-Drama episode as an example, we can see that there are 6 possible languages for subtitles available (YouTube Player > Settings > Subtitles/CC):

  • Arabic

  • English

  • Korean

  • Spanish

  • Turkish

  • Korean (auto-generated)

Using e.g.:

youtube-dl --list-subs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6xGVEXcj3k

Will produce a list of subtitle options, including a list of those specific to the given video:

...
hmn      vtt, ttml, srv3, srv2, srv1
Available subtitles for B6xGVEXcj3k:
Language formats
ko       vtt, ttml, srv3, srv2, srv1
es       vtt, ttml, srv3, srv2, srv1
tr       vtt, ttml, srv3, srv2, srv1
en       vtt, ttml, srv3, srv2, srv1
ar       vtt, ttml, srv3, srv2, srv1

Note that only 5 relevant options are listed as the Korean (auto-generated) subtitles are omitted.

You can then download e.g. English and Spanish subtitles (along with the video) using:

youtube-dl --sub-lang en,es --write-sub https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6xGVEXcj3k

To skip downloading the video and get just the subtitles, add the --skip-download option e.g.:

youtube-dl --sub-lang en,es --write-sub --skip-download https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6xGVEXcj3k

You can even get all 5 available subtitle files at once with the --all-subs option:

 youtube-dl --all-subs --skip-download https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6xGVEXcj3k

Converting Subtitles

Note that YouTube subtitles default to .vtt (WEBVTT) format. If you prefer not to have your subtitles in the .vtt format, you can use ffmpeg to convert them manually with e.g.:

ffmpeg -i input.vtt output.srt

There is also an option to --convert-subs automatically with youtube-dl/FFmpeg e.g.:

youtube-dl --sub-lang en,es --write-sub --convert-subs srt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6xGVEXcj3k

However, there are several caveats to converting subtitles:

  1. In either case, ffmpeg must reside somewhere on your system. You can get Windows builds of FFmpeg from third-parties, such as the builds kindly provided by gyan.dev.

  2. The second automatic option (apparently) doesn't work with --skip-download currently e.g.:

    # Fail! Subtitles will be downloaded but remain in their original e.g.
# .vtt format. Confirmed with youtube-dl.exe v2021.05.16.

    youtube-dl --sub-lang en,es --write-sub --convert-subs srt --skip-download https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6xGVEXcj3k

  3. Finally, while I don't know the source of this problem, youtube-dl.exe (2021.05.16) on Windows 10 21H1 (May 2021) did not seem to recognize ffmpeg in the System Path for me. Instead, a copy of ffmpeg.exe had to be placed directly in the same folder as youtube-dl.exe for it to be recognized as present during post-processing (you could also use a symbolic link with a proper file extension [i.e. ffmpeg.exe] if you wanted to save some space).

Anaksunaman
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