YouTube to Text — Convert YouTube Videos to Text Free
You have a YouTube URL. You want the text. The simplest possible framing of the job: video URL in, text file out. Paste the link, click convert, download the transcript. Works on any public YouTube video regardless of whether the creator enabled captions. For structured output with H2 topic sections and inline timestamps (much more useful for AI workflows), use the Markdown variant.
Why "YouTube to Text" matters
Most useful information from YouTube isn't in YouTube itself — it's in the words being spoken. The video is the delivery vehicle; the substance is text trapped inside an audio track. Converting to text turns a 45-minute video into something you can skim in 5 minutes, ctrl-F across, paste into a document, feed to an AI, or cite in research. The text is the actual content; the video is the container.
What we do differently than browser extensions
Most "YouTube to text" browser extensions scrape YouTube's built-in caption sidebar — so you're stuck with whatever quality YouTube's auto-captions provide (flat, often inaccurate, missing entirely on un-captioned videos). mdisbetter runs server-side speech recognition (Whisper-class) directly on the video's audio, so the output is more accurate, works on un-captioned videos, and you get a clean downloadable text file rather than copy-paste from a sidebar.
Workflow
Paste the YouTube URL into the converter, click Convert, wait a few minutes (depends on video length), download the .txt file. No browser extension to install, no YouTube account to link, no caption-sidebar scraping. Works equally on YouTube, YouTube Music, YouTube Shorts, and YouTube live VODs (after the livestream has finished processing into a regular video).
Frequently asked questions
How is this different from a YouTube transcript browser extension?
Browser extensions scrape YouTube's built-in caption sidebar, so you're stuck with auto-caption quality (flat, often inaccurate on technical content or accented speech, missing entirely on un-captioned videos). mdisbetter runs server-side Whisper-class speech recognition directly on the video's audio — more accurate, works on un-captioned videos, gives you a clean downloadable file. No extension to install, no permission grants, just paste the URL.
Does it work on YouTube Shorts?
Yes — YouTube Shorts are just short videos technically. Paste the Shorts URL, get the transcript back. The output is just a few lines for a typical 30-60 second Short, but the workflow is identical to long-form video. Useful for capturing creator quotes from Shorts you want to reference.
Will it work on age-restricted or members-only YouTube videos?
Public videos work directly via URL. Age-restricted and members-only content requires you to download the video first (yt-dlp handles auth-gated content if you're a legitimate viewer with valid cookies/credentials) and upload the resulting file to the video converter. The text output is identical either way; the difference is just whether mdisbetter's URL workflow can resolve the content directly.
How accurate is the transcription compared to YouTube's auto-captions?
Whisper-class models typically outperform YouTube's auto-captions, especially on technical content (95%+ vs YouTube's often-poor performance on jargon), accented speech (consistent quality across accents vs YouTube's English-bias), and audio with mild background noise. For straightforward English content with clean audio, both are similar quality. The mdisbetter advantage compounds when the video is technical, accented, or has imperfect audio — exactly the cases where YouTube's auto-captions struggle most.
Can I batch-convert many YouTube URLs at once?
Not via the web tool — mdisbetter is one-URL-at-a-time. For batch YouTube-to-text on many videos (a whole playlist, a channel's archive), use yt-dlp to download the audio in bulk (one command for a whole playlist) then faster-whisper to transcribe locally. Both MIT-licensed, free, processes hundreds of hours overnight on a GPU. mdisbetter's web tool is for one-off conversions where the per-URL workflow is acceptable.
Your AI doesn't read PDFs directly. It first has to extract the text, decode the layout, ignore the metadata — before it can even start answering. A Markdown file removes all of those steps. Your AI reads it instantly. So you get faster responses, more accurate results, and zero information lost along the way.
Size-wise, it's 100 to 500 times lighter for the same content. A 15 MB PDF becomes a 30 KB .md file. So your AI knowledge base can hold hundreds of documents instead of a handful.
MDisBetter brings 19 free tools together for that — documents, videos, audio, web pages and prompts.
How does it work?
Drop a PDF, a video, an audio file or a URL. MDisBetter extracts the content and gives you a clean Markdown file. So you can send it to your AI, add it to your project files, or store it in your knowledge base — without losing anything.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I convert a PDF to Markdown for free?
Upload your PDF to MDisBetter, click Convert, and get structured Markdown in seconds. No signup, no installation — it works directly in your browser. The free plan includes 50 credits per month.
Why is Markdown better than PDF for AI?
Markdown reduces token usage by up to 95% compared to PDF. AI models like ChatGPT and Claude process Markdown far more efficiently because it contains only content structure — no fonts, no layout data, no binary overhead.
What file types can MDisBetter convert?
MDisBetter converts PDF, Word (.docx), plain text, YouTube videos (transcript), audio files (MP3, WAV, M4A, OGG, FLAC, WEBM), and any web page URL to clean Markdown.
Is MDisBetter free?
Yes, free to start. The free plan includes 50 credits per month. All processing happens securely — your files are never stored.
Can I extract a YouTube transcript as Markdown?
Yes. Paste the YouTube video URL, click Convert, and get the full transcript structured as Markdown with headings and timestamps. Perfect for feeding video content to AI tools.
PDF → Markdown
Faithful and structured conversion of your documents
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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
Questions
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