Youtube subtitle scraper broken due to Youtube update Jun/2025

Tim · June 13, 2025, 10:56am

1. The problem

Currently all subtitle scraping operations return “subtitles was empty”

2. Screenshot or task log of the problem

This is due to a change in the way youtube provides subtitles.

Investigating a fix now.

leonardopederzoli · June 16, 2025, 11:20am

Good morning, master. How is this topic going? My operation is stopped because of this Please help me

Thank you

Tim · June 16, 2025, 11:21am

Still an issue, waiting for the authors of youtube sub scraper to figure a solution for people like us downstream.

Follow here:

github.com/algolia/youtube-captions-scraper

getSubtitles always returns an empty array – no captions found (2025 june)

opened 08:44AM - 10 Jun 25 UTC

thomasperge

Hi, Thanks for this helpful library! Since yesterday, `getSubtitles` consisten…tly returns an empty array (`[]`), even for videos that clearly have captions available — both user-submitted and auto-generated ones. #### Example: Video ID: `Q3o3C2J4y7c` Expected subtitles, but instead got: ```json { "error": "No captions found" } ``` Code: ```js import { getSubtitles } from 'youtube-captions-scraper'; getSubtitles({ videoID: 'Q3o3C2J4y7c', lang: 'fr' }).then(captions => { console.log(captions); // always [] }); ``` This happens for all video IDs I try, and in multiple languages. It seems like YouTube may have changed something in their captions endpoints or html structure. Would love an update or fix if possible 🙏 Thanks in advance