Does not work with all videos

[miracle2k]

For example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNiFoYt69-w

The /timedtext url doesn't return anything - any idea why? This tool can do it:

http://mo.dbxdb.com/

[miracle2k]

Turns out you need to specify the name as well:

http://video.google.com/timedtext?lang=fr&v=PILzP-bIeLo&name=french

[ivanxuu]

yep! you are right It happens that when the track has a name (for instance in multitrack videos), the track name must be in the name parameter (and thats mandatory or you will get an empty response) I will take a look ASAP

[ghost]

Now, it should work with:

./getyoutubecc.py -v PILzP-bIeLo -l fr -t french

[ghost]

BTW if you want a translation of that video (google automated translation):

./getyoutubecc.py -v PILzP-bIeLo -l fr -t french -T en

[coderholic]

I'm seeing problems with some videos, eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0kaHon3I3o

$ ./getyoutubecc.py -v C0kaHon3I3o -l en -t english
downloading C0kaHon3I3o captions
video id: C0kaHon3I3o
video language: en
video track: english
translate video to:

It doesn't create an output file. Same problem without the -l or -t arguments. Any fix for this?

[coderholic]

Looking at the network inspector when loading https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBu21qdGDl4 I see that the page loads the subtitles from https://www.youtube.com/api/timedtext?caps=asr&hl=en-GB&signature=26433C4A5DD34B3284C2AEBE8C57776661867FC9.D20A184973A7353310B86E6EE5EBB29FBF77D3BB&sparams=asr_langs%2Ccaps%2Cv%2Cexpire&key=yttt1&asr_langs=nl%2Cja%2Cen%2Cpt%2Cko%2Cde%2Cru%2Cfr%2Cit%2Ces&v=gBu21qdGDl4&expire=1423226740&type=track&lang=en&name&kind=asr&fmt=1, exploding that out gives:

caps: "asr"
asr_langs: "nl,ja,en,pt,ko,de,ru,fr,it,es"
expire: "1423226740"
fmt: "1"
hl: "en-GB"
key: "yttt1"
kind: "asr"
lang: "en"
name: "undefined"
signature: "26433C4A5DD34B3284C2AEBE8C57776661867FC9.D20A184973A7353310B86E6EE5EBB29FBF77D3BB"
sparams: "asr_langs,caps,v,expire"
type: "track"
v: "gBu21qdGDl4"

So it looks like google have added a bunch of required parameters to the URL. Is there any known way around this?

[ivanxuu]

Yep, youtube changed their API yet another time, so this script is really outdated. I'm going to write a note in the description.

It seems they over complicated the API. Youtube requires the app to be registered, and I can't even find documentation in their API about the subtitles..

I'm not planning on fixing this anytime soon. If you want to fix it just let me know.

[coderholic]

OK thanks, that's what I suspected.

I found out you can download them with youtube-dl, with the --write-auto-sub argument.

[ivanxuu]

Hey, I didn't know that youtube-dl could also download subs. That's good news. I will update the description with that info. Thanks

[averagehat]

In case anyone else is interested in this and solely downloading the captions, not the video, youtube-dl can be used like: youtube-dl --write-auto-sub --skip-download [some url]