You found the video you needed on YouTube, but you do not want to watch the whole thing just for a couple of lines. Or you need the text of a lecture to translate it, quote it, or simply skim through it. YouTube subtitles solve this, but copying them from the site itself is not easy: the interface gives you no download button, and third-party services often break or ask for payment. Archivarix Tube Search has a simple way to get the subtitles of any video, and more importantly, it works even for clips that have already been removed from YouTube.

How to download subtitles in a couple of clicks. Paste the video link or its 11-character ID into the search, and the system will gather every available subtitle track. For videos that still live on YouTube, we fetch the subtitles directly and in real time. You can download a single track as an SRT file, or all tracks at once as a single ZIP archive. More than 240 languages are supported, including auto-generated tracks and ones uploaded by the author. The details are collected in a separate guide to downloading subtitles.

And what if the video has no subtitles at all? This happens often: the author did not turn them on, and the automatic ones were never created. That used to be a dead end. Not anymore. If a video has no ready subtitles, Tube Search can generate a transcript using artificial intelligence. We take the audio track and recognize the speech, producing the same clean text with timecodes that you could have downloaded if the subtitles had been there in the first place. This works for videos in different languages and saves the day when no other option is left. How it works is described in the guide to AI transcript generation.

The most interesting part is about deleted videos. When a clip disappears from YouTube, its page stops existing, but if a web archive managed to index it in time, the subtitles are preserved along with the rest of the metadata. Tube Search looks through archival sources such as the Wayback Machine and Common Crawl, and retrieves subtitles even for videos that are no longer there. No ordinary subtitle downloader can do this, because it queries YouTube directly, where the deleted clip is already gone. We query the archive. And if a deleted video had no subtitles in the archive but its video file survived, AI generation works too, just as it does for live clips.

Who needs this. Researchers and journalists who reference videos in their work and want to capture the text in case it gets removed. Translators who need the source text rather than a version pieced together by ear. Anyone learning a language from videos who wants to read along while listening. And those who are simply trying to recall what was in a clip that is no longer available.

Subtitles are available for free and without registration. A free account lifts some of the limits and unlocks batch archive downloads and search history. You can try it right now on the Archivarix Tube Search page.

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