Prepublish: Free YouTube Script Tools

Pull the script out of any YouTube video, count words, plan runtime, and run free script checks. No signup.

Prepublish reads a YouTube video's caption track and turns it into a draft you can measure before you record. Open the extension on a video page and press Pull script. It works on standard videos, Shorts, and live streams. It reads the video's own captions and shows you the word count, the runtime, and the spoken pace. You can also paste a video URL if the video you want is not the one you are watching. The text always comes from the language the video is spoken in, never from an auto-translation of it. Every result says which language it read, whether the captions were written by hand or generated by speech recognition, and whether that language is the one spoken in the video. When a video has more than one caption track, a switcher reads another one instead. Every result also opens that video's public transcript page on prepublish.ai. The extension passes only the video id in the address; no caption text and nothing from your browser is uploaded, and the server fetches the transcript itself. The page works in any browser, with or without the extension installed. The popup has four tabs. Video: read the captions of the video in the active tab or of a pasted URL, and see words, runtime, and spoken pace. The result carries the video's thumbnail, title, channel, runtime, view count, publish date, and description, with buttons to open the public transcript page, to copy the title, the description, the thumbnail address, or the video address, to download the thumbnail, or to copy the details and the text together. Export the whole result as a Markdown document or a JSON file, metadata included. Script: a word counter for any draft. Words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs, with estimated runtime at any pace from 80 to 250 words per minute, the number of words that fit in the first 15 and 30 seconds, a literal filler-word count, and a reference table of typical word ranges by video length. Plan: convert words to minutes and minutes to words at 110, 140, or 170 words per minute; measure your own speaking pace with the read-aloud timer, or by pasting a section and typing the time it took; and work out a word target for a duration you have in mind. Checks: opens one of the free tools on prepublish.ai with your text, video link, or channel link already filled in, so you do not paste it twice. The workspace is a full-tab reading view: prose, timestamped, and editable views of the same text, find-in-page, copy, and export to .txt, .srt, .vtt, and .md. Exports keep the caption timing, so what you pulled becomes a subtitle file without extra work. The workspace also shows the video details card, the collapsible description, and the same Markdown and JSON downloads. What runs on your machine: every count, every runtime estimate, the opening-seconds budget, the filler count, the words-to-minutes converter, the pace timer, and the word targets by duration. That is arithmetic over text you can already see. What opens on prepublish.ai: the transcript page described above, and the checks that need judgement rather than arithmetic. Those read how hard an opening works, how a title is likely to be clicked, whether a draft is heading for advertiser-friendly trouble, and what a channel's viewers are asking for in its comments. Each one is free, runs on the website, and allows a limited number of runs per day. Nothing is sent anywhere until you click a check, and then only the text you chose to send. Who it is for: creators who write spoken scripts and want to know how long a draft runs before they record, whether the opening fits in the first 30 seconds, and how a draft compares to a target length. No account. No tracking. The extension has no analytics and no telemetry, and the draft you are working on stays in your browser. A small Script button also appears under the player on YouTube video pages, including Shorts and live streams. It reads the page you are on and opens that video's transcript page on prepublish.ai. You can switch the button off in the extension's settings.