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YouTube Timestamp Extractor
Paste a YouTube URL. Get clean timestamped markdown chapters in seconds — perfect for show notes, study guides, or LLM prompts.
How it works
- 01Paste any YouTube URL (video or Shorts).
- 02We fetch the transcript and group it into ~60-second timestamped chunks.
- 03Copy the markdown or download as a .md file. Ready to paste anywhere.
What is a YouTube timestamp extractor?
A timestamp extractor turns a YouTube video into a timestamped text document — one heading per minute, followed by exactly what was said in that minute. Instead of scrubbing the YouTube player back and forth trying to remember where the interesting part was, you get a scannable transcript where every idea is anchored to a clickable time.
YouTube ships its own chapter feature, but creators have to add it manually — so 90% of videos on the platform have none. This tool works on every captioned video, which is nearly all of them. You get the same navigation experience on a 3-hour podcast that you get on a professionally chaptered tutorial.
When people use this tool
- Podcast show notes. Interview a guest on YouTube, paste the URL, drop the markdown into your newsletter or Substack with timestamps linking back to each moment. What used to take 90 minutes now takes 90 seconds.
- Study + lecture notes. Grab a 45-minute lecture from YouTube, convert it, then highlight the timestamps where the professor introduced key terms. Review by jumping to each timestamp on YouTube instead of scrubbing.
- LLM prompts. Drop the full timestamped markdown into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini and ask "summarize the main argument" or "pull every number the speaker cites". The model works much better on structured transcript than on raw video.
- Research and journalism. Pull direct quotes with exact timestamps from interviews or press conferences. Search-friendly text that also links back to the source for verification.
- Accessibility. Readers who can't watch video (bandwidth, environment, hearing) can scan the markdown on any device.
Example output
Here's the first few minutes from a typical podcast episode:
## 00:00 Welcome to the show. Today we're sitting down with Sarah, who spent the last decade studying how habits form in knowledge workers. Sarah, thanks for joining us. ## 01:00 So the question I keep getting is — why do most productivity systems fail within six weeks? And I think the answer isn't motivation, it's friction. Any system that requires more than two decisions per day gets abandoned. ## 02:00 The specific number we found was 2.3 decisions. Past that, the cognitive load compounds and people start skipping days. And once you skip two days, there's a 64% chance you never come back. ## 03:00 The practical fix is what we call decision pre-loading...
Each heading is a clickable time anchor. Paste into Notion and the timestamps stay searchable; paste into Obsidian and they become navigation links.
Frequently asked questions
Is this YouTube timestamp extractor free?+
Yes — completely free, no signup, no credit card, no ads. Paste a URL, get markdown. You can run it as many times as you want.
Which YouTube videos work?+
Any public YouTube video that has captions — either the creator uploaded them or YouTube auto-generated them. Most videos published in the last few years have captions. Short videos (YouTube Shorts), podcasts, lectures, interviews, and tutorials all work.
How is this different from YouTube's built-in chapters?+
YouTube chapters only exist if the creator manually added them to the description. Most videos have none. This tool works on every captioned video automatically — you never have to hope the creator did the work for you.
What does the output look like?+
Clean markdown with a timestamp heading every ~60 seconds followed by the transcript for that segment. Rounded timestamps (00:00, 01:00, 02:00…) so it is easy to scan. Ready to paste into Notion, Obsidian, Discord, a show-notes doc, or an LLM prompt.
Can I download the result?+
Yes — one click downloads a .md file. Or copy the whole block to your clipboard.
Do I need an API key or to log in?+
Neither. Just paste a YouTube URL.
Why 60-second chunks?+
One-minute segments are the sweet spot: dense enough to contain an idea, short enough to scrub through. Longer chunks blur the timestamps; shorter ones make the output noisy.
What if the video has no captions?+
The tool will tell you and stop. Rare, but it happens with very old uploads, music-only videos, or videos where the creator disabled captions.
Want more than timestamps?
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