How I Built a YouTube Transcript Exporter Chrome Extension

Here's how I built it in less than a week. What it does Opens on any YouTube video, scrapes the transcript from the DOM, and lets you download it as a .txt or .csv file. No API key. No backend. Pure JavaScript. The hardest part YouTube loads transcripts lazily — the DOM elements only exist after the user opens the transcript panel. That means you can't just scrape on page load. You have to wait for the user to open it first, then read from the DOM. The selector that unlocked everything