Building a "paste a YouTube link, get a transcript" feature sounds trivial until you deploy it to a server. The moment your request comes from a datacenter IP instead of a residential one, YouTube responds with LOGIN_REQUIRED or quietly serves nothing. Here's how VidTranscriber handles it.
The problem
There are two ways to get text from a YouTube video:
Existing captions — if the uploader (or YouTube's auto-caption) provides them, you can fetch the caption track directly. Fast, free, no transcription needed.
Transcribe the audio — pull the audio stream and run it through a speech-to-text model (Whisper-family). Works for any video, but costs compute.
