Get a YouTube transcript as Markdown

Paste a YouTube URL into Milldown and get the video's transcript as clean Markdown — ready for notes, summaries, or your knowledge base. Fetched directly from your Mac, no third-party transcript service involved.

How it works

Copy the YouTube video URL.
Press ⌘L in Milldown and paste it.Milldown recognizes YouTube links and retrieves the transcript rather than the page markup.
Copy or save the transcript as Markdown.Add front matter to keep the source URL attached to your notes.

What people use it for

Summaries — paste an hour-long talk's transcript into Claude and ask for the five key points.
Research — quote talks precisely instead of paraphrasing from memory.
Knowledge bases — conference talks and tutorials become searchable text in your vault.
RAG pipelines — chunk the transcript (Refine → Export Chunks) and index it alongside your documents.

What you get

The video title, its description, keywords and runtime, and the full transcript — as one Markdown document. Milldown reads the captions YouTube already publishes; no third-party transcript service is involved.

A note on token savings: Milldown shows no savings figure for videos, and that is deliberate. YouTube's watch page is around 433,000 tokens of HTML, so claiming a 99% reduction would be easy — but that HTML is mostly the site's own application state, and it does not even contain the transcript. There is no way to hand a video to an LLM except as a transcript, which makes this output the baseline rather than a saving against one. The value here is getting the transcript at all, cleanly, with its metadata attached.

Requirements and limits

The video needs captions — either uploaded by the creator or YouTube's auto-generated ones (most videos have them). Auto-captions carry auto-caption quality: proper nouns and technical terms sometimes come out creative. Private and age-restricted videos aren't accessible.

Try it on your own files

Milldown converts PDFs, Office documents, web pages, and scans into clean Markdown — entirely on your Mac. Free for 14 days.

Get Milldown for macOS

macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon · $39 one-time after trial (excl. VAT) · no subscription