Can ChatGPT transcribe a video?
Not directly. ChatGPT does not watch video, and pasting a YouTube link will not get you a transcript of it. What works is pulling the audio track out of the file first and uploading that, on a paid plan. Even then you get prose back, with no captions, no clickable timestamps and no subtitle file, which is usually the whole reason someone wanted the video transcribed.
Upload the video, export subtitles.
From an MP4 to a timed transcript in one step
- 1
Separate the audio from the video
A video file is a container holding a picture track and a sound track. Transcription only needs the sound. Extracting it first also shrinks the file dramatically, which matters given the size cap.
- 2
Upload the audio, not the video
Upload the extracted MP3 or M4A on a paid ChatGPT plan and ask for a verbatim transcript. Ask explicitly, or you are likely to get a summary of the video rather than what was said in it.
- 3
Expect prose, not captions
What comes back is a block of text. Captioning a video needs timed cues in an SRT or VTT file, and ChatGPT does not produce one, so this route stops short of the job for anyone who wanted subtitles.
- 4
Use a tool that goes straight from video
Hilite takes an MP4 and returns a timestamped transcript with speaker labels and an SRT export, with no extraction step in the middle.
Keep working inside the Hilite editor
Your uploaded files open directly in a focused editor view. Arrange your clips, preview the timeline, adjust transitions, and export when the track sounds perfectly right.
- Review the transcript in context
- Keep timestamps with the words
- Copy, export, or keep editing
Input formats
Output formats
Built for every kind of audio
Whatever you are making, this tool helps you get to a cleaner, more useful result, then hand off to Hilite to enhance and polish.
- A link is not a filePasting a YouTube URL into ChatGPT does not give it the video. At best it reads the page around the video, which is why the answer you get back can look confident and be wrong.
- Captions need timingSubtitles are not text, they are text with in and out points for every line. Any route that ends in a paragraph of prose cannot caption anything.
- The extraction step is avoidablePulling the audio out of a video, shrinking it, splitting it and stitching the pieces back together is four manual steps that exist only to work around a size limit.
Made for podcasters and their teams
Trim the dead air off the top and tail, and every recording is ready to edit, enhance, and publish.
FAQ
Common questions
If you do not see your question here, the support team replies within one business day.
- No. ChatGPT cannot play the video. It may read the page around it, including the title, description and any published transcript, which can produce an answer that reads like a transcript and is not one. If the video has captions, YouTube's own transcript panel is the honest source.
- Common audio formats including MP3, M4A, WAV and FLAC. The practical constraint is size rather than format: the Whisper API rejects a single request over 25MB.
- No. There is no SRT or VTT export. You would get text and then have to time every cue by hand, which takes longer than transcribing it properly in the first place.
- No. Nothing in this route touches the picture track, so anything shown on screen and not spoken aloud will not appear.
- Upload the MP4 to Hilite. It reads the audio out of the video for you and returns a transcript with speaker labels and timestamps, exportable as TXT, DOCX or SRT, free to start in the browser.
Skip the extraction step
Drop in an MP4 and get a timestamped transcript with speaker labels and an SRT file, free in the browser.