Hey Stacker News,

Perhaps you recognize this:

I was working through a course with hundreds of videos and wanted to extract the transcripts to study properly. But every video had its own transcript button. Manually clicking through each one was brutal and the cloud tools I found either didn't work on gated content, wanted me to create an account, or made me wonder what they were doing with my learning history.

So I built Ditto: a free browser extension that extracts transcripts from any video with captions—one click, 100% local, no account required.

What it does:
• Extracts from many platforms: including gated courses on Udemy, Coursera, Teachable, and Kajabi, not just public YouTube
• Runs entirely in your browser: no servers, no uploads, no data leaves your device
• Formats intelligently: strips timestamps and reconstructs clean paragraphs ready for Notion, Obsidian, or your AI tool of choice
• No account, no paywall: free forever, open source (MIT), supported by optional Lightning zaps

What it doesn't do (yet):
• Ditto extracts existing captions: it doesn't generate transcripts from audio.
• And right now it's one video at a time. Batch extraction for entire courses and YouTube channels is on the roadmap if there's interest.

I haven't tested every platform (TikTok, Microsoft Teams—unknown territory), so if you try it somewhere new, let me know what you find.

Try it:
• Install from the Chrome web store
• Navigate to any video with captions
• Click the Ditto icon: transcript copied

If Ditto saves you time, I'd love your feedback here or on the Chrome web store. First 25 people to leave a review get added to the contributors list as founding supporters.

I'll be in the comments. Ask me anything about it.