Extracts video subtitles using yt-dlp (recommended) or youtube-dl (poorly supported) and shows them in a buffer.
I was having a conversation one day and I couldn’t recall the name of a term, something I learned from a YouTube video. That bothered me. After the chat, I went back to YouTube, found the video, and started searching through it. I increased the playback speed and went back and forth but still couldn’t find it. After a few minutes of that struggle, I thought: “what the heck am I doing?”. Then I wrote a tiny elisp function to extract subtitles. While reading through the subs I realized how much good stuff went past my ears (while watching the video), so I made it into a package.
It works by calling yt-dlp (preferred), or youtube-dl command line utility. Make sure at least one of them is installed and available at $PATH.
yt-dlp is a youtube-dl fork that adds new features and fixes known bugs. Notably, it knows how to extract auto-generated subtitles, and youtube-dl does not (there’s an outstanding bug that needs fixing - as of October 2022).
Without the option of extracting auto-generated subtitles, this package would be useless for the majority of videos on YouTube.
Update: Initially, it was written with the support of youtube-dl, but lately, I’ve been using it exclusively with yt-dlp. There are minor differences between these two tools, and the proper work with youtube-dl at this point is not guaranteed.
Install yt-dlp, unless already installed
You can install it using your favorite Emacs package management tool.
packages.el
(package! youtube-sub-extractor)config.el
(use-package! youtube-sub-extractor
:commands (youtube-sub-extractor-extract-subs)
:config
(map! :map youtube-sub-extractor-subtitles-mode-map
:desc "copy timestamp URL" :n "RET" #'youtube-sub-extractor-copy-ts-link
:desc "browse at timestamp" :n "C-c C-o" #'youtube-sub-extractor-browse-ts-link))
(setq youtube-sub-extractor-timestamps 'left-margin)The package is simple and the main command is youtube-sub-extractor-extract-subs
You can bind it to a key if you like:
(global-set-key "C-c C-x y" #'youtube-sub-extractor-extract-subs)Doom users probably would want to use the leader key, e.g.,
(map! :leader :desc "YouTube subs" "oy" #''youtube-sub-extractor-extract-subs)Other customizable vars are:
youtube-sub-extractor-timestamps (default right-margin) - sets the way how timestamps should be displayed,
either as overlays on the right-margin or left-margin, or they need to be printed, for example, if you want to copy the text and include the timestamps, in that case, set the value to left-side-text.
youtube-sub-extractor-executable-path (default nil). The package tries to find the required executable at $PATH, but you may have to set the full path to it explicitly.
youtube-sub-extractor-min-chunk-size (default 5 seconds). YouTube very often chunks up the subs into pieces too small (a couple of seconds), especially for auto-generated subs. You may want to set different size.
youtube-sub-extractor-language-choice (default t). Just leave it as is and it will always ask for when multiple language choices are available. If you’re only interested in a specific language, set the var. See the docstring for details.
In the subtitles buffer (when subs get successfully extracted) it enables a minor mode, so you can bind keys to specific commands. By default, they are set to RET (to copy the link to the video at a specific timestamp) and C-c C-o (to browse the video at the timestamp), you can change those, e.g.,
(define-key
youtube-sub-extractor-subtitles-mode-map (kbd "C-RET")
#'youtube-sub-extractor-copy-ts-link)
(define-key
youtube-sub-extractor-subtitles-mode-map (kbd "C-c b")
#'youtube-sub-extractor-browse-ts-link)Evil (non-Doom) users can do it like so, Doom users see previous section:
(evil-define-minor-mode-key 'normal 'youtube-sub-extractor-subtitles-mode
(kbd "C-RET") #'youtube-sub-extractor-copy-ts-link)