## Description
The `YouTube Transcript Fetcher` is a high-performance, command-line utility designed to extract transcripts directly from YouTube videos using the official internal caption delivery API. By bypassing traditional HTML scraping or headless browser automation, it achieves near-instant retrieval of caption data. The tool supports multiple output formats (Text, JSON, SRT, WebVTT), handles batch processing, and maintains language priority with automatic fallback.

## System Overview

```mermaid
graph TD
    A[User Commands] --> B[main.py CLI Handler]
    B --> C[YouTubeTranscriptApi Instance]
    C --> D[YouTube timedtext Endpoint]
    D -- XML/JSON Data --> C
    C -- List of Snippets --> B
    B --> E{Output Mode}
    E -->|Write to File| F[Exported Transcript]
    E -->|Terminal| G[Standard Output]
```

## Project Structure

```text
youtube-transcript-fetcher/
├── .gitignore
├── GUIDE.md
├── LICENSE
├── main.py
├── README.md
├── STACKS.md
└── requirements.txt
```

## Techstack
Audit of project files (excluding environment and cache):

| File Type | Count | Size (KB) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Python (.py) | 1 | 9.9 |
| Markdown (.md) | 2 | 8.6 |
| Text (.txt) | 1 | 0.1 |
| Gitignore (.gitignore) | 1 | 0.1 |
| License | 1 | 1.1 |

**Total Files**: 6

## Dependencies
- **Python**: 
  - `youtube-transcript-api`: Core caption data retrieval and formatting.
  - `argparse`: Command-line interface definition and parsing.
  - `requests`: Underlying HTTP request handling (via the API library).
  - `re`: URL parsing and video ID extraction.