🎥 YouTube Transcript Extractor & Cleaner

A high-performance, modern cross-platform desktop application to retrieve, clean, and format YouTube video transcripts. It strips timestamps, collapses annotations, resolves spacing, and formats transcripts into readable paragraphs—all packaged in a zero-dependency, standalone application using Qt6.

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📦 How to Install & Run

1. Head over to the Releases page.
2. Download the package for your operating system:
   • Windows: Download YouTubeTranscribeExtractor-Windows.exe and run it directly.
   • macOS: Download YouTubeTranscribeExtractor-macOS.dmg, double-click to mount, and drag the app to your Applications folder.
   • Linux: Download YouTubeTranscribeExtractor-Linux.tar.gz, extract, and run YouTubeTranscribeExtractor.

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✨ Key Features

Feature	Description
🚀 Auto-Extraction	Simply paste any YouTube URL or Video ID to fetch the transcript instantly.
🇩🇪 Unicode/Umlaut Support	Flawless handling of German characters (ä, ö, ü, ß) and international symbols.
🧠 Smart Paragraphing	Automatically inserts paragraph breaks where speaker pauses exceed 10 seconds.
📄 PDF & TXT Export	Export fully wrapped transcripts straight to .txt files or formatted .pdf documents via Qt's native layout engine.
🔌 Cross-Platform Standalone	Compiles to native executables on Windows (.exe), macOS (.app / .dmg), and Linux (.tar.gz).

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🛠 How It Works

The application operates as a hybrid C++ Qt GUI and Python scraping backend. The Qt application extracts and runs the Python helper binary dynamically at runtime:

graph TD
    A[YouTubeTranscribeExtractor] -->|1. Runs Qt6 GUI| B(App Window)
    A -->|2. Extracts Resource| C(TEMP: YouTubeTranscribeExtractor_get_transcript)
    B -->|3. Paste URL & click Fetch| D{Execution Mode}
    D -->|Dev Mode: get_transcript.py exists| E[Execute python get_transcript.py]
    D -->|Prod Mode: standalone| F[Execute TEMP get_transcript]
    E -->|Scrapes captions| G[YouTube Captions API]
    F -->|Scrapes captions| G
    G -->|Return raw UTF-8 text| H[C++ Process: regex clean & auto-formatting]
    H -->|Format output| I[Neat Transcript Paragraphs]

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💻 Developer Guide

If you'd like to clone the repository and make further edits, follow this workflow:

Workspace Pre-requisites

1. CLion IDE or CMake
2. Qt6 SDK installed (Make sure CMake can locate the library using -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=<path_to_qt>)
3. Python 3.10+ (Added to your system PATH)
4. Python libraries:

   pip install youtube-transcript-api pyinstaller

Local Development Cycle

• Edit Scraper Logic: Edit get_transcript.py. When you run the C++ app in debug mode, it detects this script locally and executes it using your Python interpreter.
• Package the Helper: Once your Python changes are complete, bundle it before compiling the C++ target:

  # Windows
  py -m PyInstaller --onefile get_transcript.py
  
  # macOS/Linux
  pyinstaller --onefile get_transcript.py

• Edit GUI & Build: Make modifications to main.cpp and compile using CMake.

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📜 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.