Captions are the deliverable everyone agrees matters and nobody budgets for. They serve deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers, the majority who watch muted, the translators who need source files, and the search engines that index text — four audiences from one artifact. Yet in most production pipelines, captioning is the step that slips: auto-captions stay unedited (and their errors become your brand's typos), SRT files get made once for the big launch video and never again.

The grind is the reason — per-video, per-format file wrangling across a back catalog of dozens or hundreds of uploads. It's exactly the kind of mechanical volume work that shouldn't touch a human's week.

run_youtube_tool's srt-vtt-downloader produces the caption files — standard SRT/VTT from any public video's URL, ready for your player, your translators, or your re-upload pipeline. Batch it across the catalog and the captioning backlog becomes an afternoon.

library_import_youtube_video plus get_youtube_transcript supply the companion artifact: the clean, timestamped transcript — the master text your captions, blog embeds, and site search all derive from (pulls are free once imported). And for spoken-word content that needs a fresh transcription pass, stt-transcription runs speech-to-text through the same entry point. One workflow, every text artifact a video owes the world.