For a long time our service had a ceiling: videos longer than about four hours would not go through. For most people that was plenty. But if you record full-day conferences, long livestreams or three-hour podcast episodes, that limit meant splitting a recording into pieces just to get it transcribed.
That limit is gone. We rebuilt the part of the pipeline that handles long recordings, and YoutubeToText now transcribes videos up to 12 hours long, in one pass.
Transcribing a long interview or hearing? See interview transcript for the verbatim version with a label for each speaker.
What changed
The old four-hour cap came from how very long audio was processed in one go. We reworked that step, so length is no longer the blocker. A 12-hour recording now goes through the same way a ten-minute one does: downloaded, transcribed, aligned and returned as one result.
You still get one transcript. No cutting it up yourself, no stitching files back together, no hunting for where one part ended and the next began. You paste a link and get the whole thing.
What you can transcribe now
- Full-day conferences and summits: a whole track in one transcript instead of one per session.
- Long livestreams: gaming sessions, launch-day streams, fundraisers and 24-hour events.
- Long podcasts: two- and three-hour conversations, in full.
- Lecture series and workshops: a complete course recording of several hours.
- Webinars and AMAs: every question and answer, start to finish.
It is not only plain text. The same recording can become a subtitle file (SRT or WebVTT) or a video with burned-in subtitles, and the longer limit applies to all three.
The trade-off: it takes time
A 12-hour video is a lot of audio, and processing it is not instant. Short videos come back in a couple of minutes; a recording of several hours takes a lot longer, roughly in line with its length.
So treat a long one as "start it and come back", not "wait and watch":
- Start the job and move on. The transcript will be waiting when it is done.
- Check your minutes first. A long video uses more of your balance than a short one, so make sure you have enough before you start. You can top up or upgrade on the pricing page.
- Clear audio still matters. Muddy audio lowers accuracy at any length; clean speech gives the best result whether the video is five minutes or five hours.
How to transcribe a long video
It is the same flow as any other video, with nothing extra to switch on:
- Copy the YouTube link.
- Paste it into the box on our homepage.
- Choose what you want: a transcript, a subtitle file or a video with burned-in subtitles.
- Start it and let it process. The result lands when it is ready.
Prefer to automate it? Long videos work through our developer tools too. Start a job and poll for the result with the transcription API, or ask your AI assistant to do it through MCP. Give either one some extra time on long jobs.