YouTube Transcript & Subtitles Extractor

Get the transcript of any YouTube video, Short or live replay: full text, timestamped segments and SRT subtitles, in the language you choose when the video has it. You pay only for transcripts that are delivered. Videos without captions and invalid links are reported, not charged.

What you get

Field	Description
videoId, url	The video
title, channelName, channelId, durationSeconds, viewCount	Basic video details
language, languageName	Language of the returned transcript
isAutoGenerated	true if YouTube generated the captions automatically
availableLanguages	Every caption track the video has
text	The full transcript as one string
segments	[{ start, duration, text }] in seconds (optional)
srt	Ready-to-use SRT subtitles (optional)

Example item:

{
  "videoId": "abcDEF12345",
  "title": "How to bake sourdough bread at home",
  "channelName": "Example Kitchen",
  "language": "en",
  "isAutoGenerated": false,
  "text": "Today we are going to bake a simple sourdough loaf ...",
  "segments": [{ "start": 0.5, "duration": 2.8, "text": "Today we are going to bake" }]
}

How to use

1. Paste YouTube links or video IDs in Videos. Watch, youtu.be, Shorts, embed and live links all work.
2. Choose a Preferred language (for example en, it, de, pt-BR).
3. Run it. Download the results as JSON, CSV or Excel, or call the Actor through the Apify API, from Make, Zapier or n8n, or from an AI agent via MCP.

Language selection

1. Manual captions in your language.
2. Auto-generated captions in your language.
3. Captions in a regional variant (for example en-GB when you asked for en).
4. Otherwise the original language is returned, and language tells you which one it is.

Errors

Failed videos appear in the dataset with an error code and are not charged:

• INVALID_INPUT: not a YouTube video link or ID
• VIDEO_UNAVAILABLE: private, removed or region-blocked video
• NO_CAPTIONS: the video has no captions or transcript
• BLOCKED / RATE_LIMITED: YouTube still refused the request after all retries (rare with the default proxy settings).

Pricing

$3 per 1,000 transcripts ($0.003 each), charged only for transcripts delivered. Videos without captions, invalid links and failures are free. The run stops by itself when your spending limit is reached.

Reliability

YouTube blocks most cloud servers. This Actor uses Apify datacenter proxies first and automatically retries blocked videos through residential proxies, so you get your transcripts instead of errors. In our tests from the Apify cloud, 20 of 20 captioned videos were delivered.

Use cases

Content repurposing and summaries, SEO and keyword research, training and RAG datasets for LLMs, accessibility and subtitles, media monitoring and research.

Notes

This Actor reads only publicly available captions. It does not download video or audio and does not log in to YouTube. Make sure your use of the transcripts respects the rights of the video owners.