How to list chapter titles from a YouTube video using youtube-dl / yt-dlp

Question

Some YouTube content creators split their videos into chapters. A subset of them kindly offer the list of chapters titles on description video, with their starting timestamp. Sometimes they decide not to show them.

How can I get the list of chapters titles?

Answer 1

Onliner to do this using yt-dlp (better alternative to youtube-dl) and jq JSON processor:

yt-dlp --dump-json  videoIDorURL | jq --raw-output ".chapters[].title"

To get starting timestamps:

 | jq --raw-output ".chapters[].start_time" | awk '{printf("%d:%02d:%02d\n",($1/60/60%24),($1/60%60),($1%60))}'

With paste and process substitution you can combine both. This is a function you could add to your .bashrc/.zshrc:

function get_chapters_times() {
  paste <(yt-dlp --dump-json $1 | jq --raw-output ".chapters[].start_time" | awk '{printf("%d:%02d:%02d\n",($1/60/60%24),($1/60%60),($1%60))}') <(yt-dlp --dump-json $1 | jq --raw-output ".chapters[].title")
}

Will return:

$ get_chapters_times https://youtu.be/DxL2HoqLbyA
0:00:00 Intro
0:02:15 History
0:04:16 Ideal Engine
0:09:48 Entropy
0:11:03 Energy Spread
0:14:49 Air Conditioning
0:17:26 Life on Earth
0:19:35 The Past Hypothesis
0:21:43 Hawking Radiation
0:23:31 Heat Death of the Universe
0:24:52 Conclusion

Use yt-dlp --split-chapters to download each chapter.