Comment by rob

There's a tool that uses YouTube's unofficial APIs to get them if they're available:

https://github.com/jdepoix/youtube-transcript-api

For our internal tool that transcribes local city council meetings on YouTube (often 1-3 hours long), we found that these automatic ones were never available though.

(Our tool usually 'processes' the videos within ~5-30 mins of being uploaded, so that's also why none are probably available 'officially' yet.)

So we use yt-dlp to download the highest quality audio and then process them with whisper via Groq, which is way cheaper (~$0.02-0.04/hr with Groq compared to $0.36/hr via OpenAI's API.) Sometimes groq errors out so there's built-in support for Replicate and Deepgram as well.

We run yt-dlp on our remote Linode server and I have a Python script I created that will automatically login to YouTube with a "clean" account and extract the proper cookies.txt file, and we also generate a 'po token' using another tool:

https://github.com/iv-org/youtube-trusted-session-generator

Both cookies.txt and the "po token" get passed to yt-dlp when running on the Linode server and I haven't had to re-generate anything in over a month. Runs smoothly every day.

(Note that I don't use cookies/po_token when running locally at home, it usually works fine there.)