General YouTube Caption Downloader

About

General YouTube Caption Downloader adds a small CC button to YouTube video pages so you can save available caption tracks as .vtt files.

Use it for personal accessibility, note-taking, research, or archiving captions for videos you can already view. The extension works with standard YouTube videos, Shorts, live replays, and embeds when captions are available from YouTube.

How it works:

Open a YouTube video.
Turn captions on if needed.
Wait for the CC button to show available caption tracks.
Click once to download the captions.
The extension runs locally in your browser. It does not ask for your YouTube password, does not export cookies, does not bypass access controls, and does not repeatedly auto-download files. It only downloads a caption file when you click the button.

If a newly uploaded video does not have captions yet, the button will stay in the waiting state until YouTube makes a caption track available.