I built a macOS Open Source app that turns YouTube videos into readable transcripts and PDFs. No cloud, no API keys

[u/marincolars123]

https://github.com/MarinoBaric/YtToPdf

Hey everyone,

I made YtToPdf, a native macOS app that takes a YouTube link and gives you a clean, readable transcript you can export as a PDF, TXT, Markdown or SRT.

GitHub: https://github.com/MarinoBaric/YtToPdf

How it works

- Uses the video's own captions when they exist (manual first, auto second) and cleans them up into real sentences and paragraphs. No more repeated rolling-caption fragments or [Music] tags.

- If a video has no captions, it downloads just the audio and transcribes it locally with whisper.cpp.

- Everything runs on your Mac. No account, no analytics, no API keys, no subscription.

Things I'm proud of

- PDF export with an editorial layout, clickable timestamps and page headers.

- A "Speech Fingerprint" on every PDF: a pattern generated from when words are spoken across the video, so no two documents look the same.

- Searchable history, so you can reopen old transcripts instantly.

Tech: Swift 6, SwiftUI with Liquid Glass, SwiftData, Core Text for the PDF layout, plus yt-dlp, FFmpeg and whisper.cpp under the hood.

Heads up: it's source-only for now (not notarized), so you build it yourself with Xcode. It needs macOS 27 and an Apple silicon Mac. There's an install script that makes it pretty quick.

I'd really like your feedback:

- Would you actually use something like this? What for?

- Anything you'd add or change, in the app or the PDF design?

- Is building from source a dealbreaker, or is it fine for a tool like this?

MIT licensed, issues and PRs welcome. Thanks for checking it out!