Comments and transcripts

Two commands cover the text around a video: comments reads the comment thread, transcript reads the captions. Both take a video id or URL, and both honor -n/--limit and --max-pages for paging, plus -o for the output format.

Comments

comments <video-id|url> streams the top-level comments for a video.

ytb comments dQw4w9WgXcQ

Flag	Meaning
--replies	Also fetch replies; each reply carries its parent_id
--all	Remove the default cap and page the whole thread
--sort	top or new

Newest 50 top-level comments:

ytb comments dQw4w9WgXcQ --sort new -n 50

Top comments with their replies threaded in:

ytb comments dQw4w9WgXcQ --replies

Comment bodies come from YouTube's current entity-payload model, so each row is parsed out of that representation rather than a flat list. With --replies, reply rows are tagged with the parent_id of the comment they answer, which lets you reassemble the thread downstream.

Restricted Mode

YouTube applies Restricted Mode to some server and datacenter IP ranges, and that mode hides comments entirely. When the response comes back gated, comments reports comments are hidden by Restricted Mode and exits with an error. It does not pretend the video has zero comments. On a normal residential connection comments stream normally. See Troubleshooting for the gating details.

Transcripts

transcript <video-id|url> lists caption tracks or fetches the chosen track as text.

ytb transcript dQw4w9WgXcQ            # joined text
ytb transcript dQw4w9WgXcQ --list     # available caption tracks

Flag	Meaning
--list	List the available caption tracks and exit
--timestamps	Emit timed {start, dur, text} segments instead of joined text
--lang	Preferred caption language (default auto / English)

Timed segments, in Spanish:

ytb transcript dQw4w9WgXcQ --timestamps --lang es

Count the words in a transcript:

ytb transcript dQw4w9WgXcQ | wc -w

Why text fetches need yt-dlp

--list always works: it reads the caption track list straight out of the player response, no extra fetch required.

Fetching the actual text is harder. YouTube gates the raw timedtext caption endpoint behind a proof-of-origin (poToken), so a direct text fetch frequently comes back empty. When that happens, transcript falls back to yt-dlp if it is on your PATH: yt-dlp extracts the subtitles and ytb parses the VTT back into segments.

If yt-dlp is not installed, the text path cannot recover and transcript reports a clear error and exits. Install yt-dlp from its repository if you want transcript text. --list keeps working either way. See Troubleshooting for more on the caption gating.