YouTube Transcript API no longer works

[chand1012]

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Attempt to download any video transcript.
   

Which Python version are you using?

3.10.10 on M1 Mac

Which version of youtube-transcript-api are you using?

0.5.0

What code / cli command are you executing?

youtube_transcript_api https://www.youtube.com/watch\?v\=-f906Sy79hA and

from youtube_transcript_api import YouTubeTranscriptApi

data = { 'url': 'https://www.youtube.com/watch\?v\=-f906Sy79hA' }
resp = YouTubeTranscriptApi.get_transcript(data['url'].split("=")[-1])

Expected behavior

List of dictionaries response of the API.

Actual behaviour

Could not retrieve a transcript for the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f906Sy79hA! This is most likely caused by:

Subtitles are disabled for this video

If you are sure that the described cause is not responsible for this error and that a transcript should be retrievable, please create an issue at https:/jdepoix/youtube-transcript-api/issues. Please add which version of youtube_transcript_api you are using and provide the information needed to replicate the error. Also make sure that there are no open issues which already describe your problem!

Additional information

Youtube-DL seems to have also broken, and the issue seems to vary by region. I will update if the issues goes away.

[chand1012]

This line seems to be the problem.

youtube-transcript-api/youtube_transcript_api/_transcripts.py

Line 51 in 6070e61

splitted_html = html.split('"captions":')

I stored the raw HTML as a file for this video and then tried to manually search for the string "captions": in the html and found nothing. I hope that there is a way around this, but for now I hope this information helps someone fix the issue.

[chand1012]

Okay, this seems to have been user error. I was accidentally inputting the entire video URL rather than just the ID to the video. Sorry for the inconvenience!

For example, this will not work.

python -m youtube_transcript_api https://www.youtube.com/watch\?v\=fE2sunDZhzg

But this will:

python -m youtube_transcript_api fE2sunDZhzg