youtube-dl, and yt-dlp are a command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com, as well as many other media streaming websites. We are a community of enthusiasts helping each other with problems and usability issues.
yt-dlp: How to ensure download of English Subtitles with preference order - Creator's English Subtitles > YouTube Auto Generated Subtitles in English?
I posted this initially under TarTube as linked and quoted below:
I always want subtitles download.. for English - whether they are added by Creator / YouTuber or auto generated by YouTube engine.
How/ what ways can this be done?
Because it seems a bunch of times I am not getting any subtitles/ cc with the video?
Here's the dev's response.
I experimented with this, but I didn't find the right combination of download options that guarantees "either automatically-generated English subtiles or creator-added subtitles". So you need to ask someone else, perhaps on Reddit or the yt-dlp developers themselves.
For comparison, I thought these download options would do that, but they don't:
--write-sub --sub-lang en --write-auto-sub
When you have your answer, you can add them to Edit > General download options... > Name, like this.
I went to yt-dlp GitHub section and it said you'll be blocked if you make a mistake in template to submit.
So maybe someone has a suggestion on this already being possible? Please share specifics.
OR
Help to frame correctly for the yt-dlp devs?
you'll be blocked if you make a mistake in template to submit.
No, everyone makes mistakes. It only says you'll be blocked if you ignore the template. It's because too many people seem to think that the template is optional and refuse to do any due diligence. Dealing with ~30% issues (780/2643 closed issues) being incomplete/invalid/duplicate is not fun.
I always want subtitles download.. for English - whether they are added by Creator / YouTuber or auto generated by YouTube engine.
--write-sub --write-auto-sub --sub-lang "en.*"
Creator-subs are automatically preferred over auto-subs if available
Top 1% Commenter
you'll want --sub-lang "en.*" to catch all the variations of english codes on youtube. maybe that's the issue?
if not, post an example video you're not getting what you want from
don't forget now they got en-en and ko-en jp-en and en_US and en-US and Eng and en. And yes I notice sometime they embed subtitle as eng(1) eng(2) where one is horrible autosub while other is hand made one. but that was a while ago.
Top 1% Commenter
You can regex match subtitles now. 'en.*' That will match anything beginning with "en", etc.
