How to get a transcript from a video

A surprising number of people assume they need video-editing software to get text out of a video file. They don't — the video track is irrelevant to a transcript, only the audio matters, and pulling it out is a solved problem that doesn't require opening an editor or learning ffmpeg on the command line.

Check one thing before you transcribe anything

If the video already has captions burned into the picture, or comes bundled with a separate .srt or .vtt file, you don't need transcription at all — you already have the text. Burned-in captions can't be extracted automatically (they're pixels, not data), but a bundled subtitle file converts to plain text or the other subtitle format instantly with Subtitle Converter, with nothing uploaded anywhere.

If there's no existing caption or subtitle file, that's when actual transcription is the right tool. Video to Text takes the video file directly — MP4, WEBM, MOV, MKV, AVI, or 3GP — extracts the audio track automatically, and transcribes it. The video itself is never stored; only the audio is processed, briefly, to produce the text. One real limitation: it needs an actual audio track to work with, so a silent screen recording or a video with the audio stripped out won't produce a transcript — there has to be speech in there for it to find.