How do I convert a PDF to Markdown for free?

Upload your PDF to mdisbetter.com, click Convert, and get clean structured Markdown in seconds. No signup, no installation — it works directly in your browser.

Why is Markdown better than PDF for AI?

Markdown reduces token usage by up to 95% compared to PDF when feeding documents to AI models like ChatGPT or Claude. PDF contains layout metadata, fonts, and binary data that waste tokens. Markdown preserves only the content structure that AI actually needs.

What file types can MDisBetter convert to Markdown?

MDisBetter converts PDF, Word (.docx), plain text, YouTube videos (transcript extraction), audio files (MP3, WAV, M4A, OGG, FLAC, WEBM), and any web page URL to clean Markdown.

Is MDisBetter free to use?

Yes, MDisBetter is completely free. You get 10 conversions per day with no signup required. All tools work directly in your browser.

How do I extract a YouTube transcript as Markdown?

Paste the YouTube video URL into the YouTube to Markdown tool on mdisbetter.com and click Convert. The tool extracts the transcript and structures it as clean, formatted Markdown with headings and timestamps.

Why are mdisbetter captions better than YouTube's auto-captions?

YouTube auto-captions use Google's in-house speech recognition, which struggles especially on technical content, accented speech, noisy audio, and uncommon vocabulary. Whisper-class models (what mdisbetter uses) typically outperform YouTube's auto-captions by 5-15 percentage points on these challenging cases. For simple English content with clean audio, the two are roughly similar; for harder content (technical, accented, noisy), mdisbetter consistently wins. The accuracy difference is what makes mdisbetter captions usable for situations where YouTube's auto-captions fall short.

How do I get the captions in SRT format for my video editor?

Two paths: (1) download the structured Markdown from mdisbetter, convert to SRT with a small script (10-15 lines of Python) or one ChatGPT prompt ("convert this timestamped Markdown to SRT subtitle format with 3-second cues"). (2) Skip mdisbetter and use OpenAI's open-source whisper CLI directly: yt-dlp -x URL && whisper extracted.mp3 --output_format srt outputs SRT in one command. The OSS path is fastest for direct SRT need; the mdisbetter path gives you the Markdown transcript as a bonus artefact.

Can I download captions in languages other than English?

Yes — mdisbetter auto-detects the source language across 50+ supported languages and transcribes in the source language. For translated captions (transcribe in source, output in different language), the workflow is two-step: transcribe with mdisbetter to get source-language Markdown, translate the text portion (paste into Claude/ChatGPT with "translate to [language] preserving timestamp structure"), convert translated text to SRT for the final captions. For high-stakes accessibility-grade translated captions, plan a human review pass on the AI translation.

Are the captions good enough for ADA / Section 508 accessibility compliance?

Auto-generated captions hit 92-97% accuracy on clean recordings, which is close to but not at the WCAG-recommended threshold for accessibility (typically 99%+ for compliance). For ADA / Section 508 / WCAG compliance contexts (educational institutions, government, federal contractors), plan a human review pass over auto-generated captions to catch and fix the 3-8% error rate. For the legal-protection layer in high-stakes contexts, use certified accessibility services (3Play Media, Rev Captions, Verbit). mdisbetter captions are a strong starting point that dramatically reduces caption-creation time vs from-scratch typing.

Can I download YouTube's own existing captions if the creator uploaded them?

For YouTube videos where the creator manually uploaded high-quality captions, those captions are usually downloadable via free tools (DownSub, YouTubeTranscript.com, browser extensions) — they scrape what YouTube already has. mdisbetter takes a different approach: instead of scraping YouTube's caption data, we generate fresh captions from the audio using Whisper-class speech recognition. For videos with creator-uploaded captions of high quality, scraping is fine. For videos with only auto-captions (the majority), mdisbetter's fresh generation is typically more accurate.

YouTube Captions Download — Free Caption Extractor

Why mdisbetter captions beat YouTube's auto-captions

YouTube auto-captions use Google's in-house speech recognition, which performs decently on simple English content with clean audio but struggles on: technical terminology (Kubernetes, GraphQL, OAuth often misrecognised), accented speech (especially non-native English), background noise (music, multiple speakers), uncommon vocabulary (medical, legal, scientific terms). Whisper-class models (what mdisbetter uses) typically outperform YouTube's auto-captions by 5-15 percentage points on these challenging cases, and roughly match on simple cases. For high-quality captions especially on technical content, our approach is consistently better.

Caption format workflow

For the captions-specific use case (importing into a video editor, uploading to your own video, accessibility compliance), you typically need SRT or VTT format. mdisbetter outputs Markdown with inline timestamps; convert to SRT either with a small script (10-15 lines of Python) or one ChatGPT prompt ("convert this timestamped Markdown to SRT subtitle format with 3-second cues"). For direct SRT generation, OpenAI's OSS Whisper CLI does this in one command: yt-dlp -x URL && whisper extracted.mp3 --output_format srt.

Common use cases for downloaded captions

Reuploading a video you have rights to, with better captions than YouTube's auto-captions provided. Translating captions into other languages for international audiences. Accessibility compliance for educational or government content (with human review pass for the legal threshold). Subtitle backup for offline reference. Editing captions for your own published videos to fix YouTube's mistakes. Generating captions for video you're embedding outside YouTube (Vimeo, Wistia, your own video player).

For non-YouTube videos with the same workflow

For Vimeo videos (which don't have YouTube-quality auto-captions), see /convert/vimeo-transcript-generator. For uploaded video files where you control the source, /convert/video-to-markdown handles the same workflow without the URL step.

Tool	Cost	Unit
Text to MD, EPUB to MD, MD to PDF, MD Cleaner, Merger, Chunker, Token Counter, Context Builder	Free	—
Word to MD	0.5 credit	per page
Excel to MD	0.5 credit	per conversion
Single URL Scrape	0.5 credit	per call
Site Crawl	1 credit	per page
Translate	1 credit	per 10 000 chars (min 1, free re-translation on cache hit)
Prompt Optimizer	1 credit	per call
System Prompt Generator	1 credit	per call
Audio to MD	2 credits	per minute
Video to MD	2 credits	per minute
YouTube to MD	2 credits	per minute
Image OCR	4 credits	per image (0 on cache hit)
PDF to MD	4 credits	per page
PPTX to MD	4 credits	per slide

YouTube Captions — Download Captions from YouTube

Why mdisbetter captions beat YouTube's auto-captions

Caption format workflow

Common use cases for downloaded captions

For non-YouTube videos with the same workflow

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Stop feeding garbageto your AI

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Stop sending PDFs to your AI.

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Frequently Asked Questions

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