YouTube Transcript Scraper - Text, Timestamps & SRT

✅ Tested daily with its default input (Apify's automated QA plus our own smoke test before every release).

YouTube transcript scraper: turn YouTube videos into text. This Actor reads the captions a video already has on YouTube (uploaded by the creator or auto-generated) and returns them as one clean block of text, a list of timestamped segments and a ready-to-use SRT subtitle file. $0.0049 per transcript, failed videos are free.

Fast and lightweight: no video or audio is downloaded, so a transcript usually arrives within a few seconds.

Features

• Bulk input: any mix of watch?v=, youtu.be/, shorts/, embed/, live/ URLs or bare 11-character video IDs
• Language choice: give one code (en) or a preference list (de,en); creator-made captions win over auto-generated ones
• Fallback: optionally return whatever language is available instead of failing
• Translation: request a target language and get YouTube's own caption translation
• Metadata: language, whether captions are auto-generated, all available caption languages, duration covered, segment count

Input

Field	Default	Description
videos	–	Video URLs or IDs
language	en	Preferred language code(s), comma-separated
anyLanguageFallback	true	Use any available language if the preferred one is missing
translateTo	–	Optional target language for translation
includeSegments	true	Add segments with start/end in seconds
includeSrt	true	Add srt subtitle text

Output (one item per video)

{
  "videoId": "jNQXAC9IVRw",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw",
  "language": "en", "isAutoGenerated": false,
  "availableLanguages": ["de", "en"],
  "durationSecs": 18.881, "segmentCount": 6,
  "text": "All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants ...",
  "segments": [{"start": <seconds>, "end": <seconds>, "text": "..."}],
  "srt": "1\n<hh:mm:ss,ms> --> <hh:mm:ss,ms>\n...\n"
}

Videos without captions (or with captions disabled) return an error field and are not charged.

Use cases

Summarising or translating videos with an LLM, building search indexes or RAG datasets over your own or public video libraries, creating subtitles, quoting talks and lectures, content research.

Pricing (pay per event)

• $0.0049 per transcript delivered. Failed videos cost nothing.

Notes

Only the videos you supply are processed. The Actor reads caption tracks only; it does not collect comments, channel data or any personal information.

Use with AI agents (MCP)

This Actor can be used as a tool by AI agents (Claude, Cursor, VS Code, other MCP clients) through the official Apify MCP server:

• Add only this Actor as a tool: https://mcp.apify.com?tools=admirala/youtube-transcript-scraper (sign in with OAuth or an Apify API token).
• Or connect https://mcp.apify.com and let the agent find it with search-actors (e.g. "youtube transcript"), read the input schema with fetch-actor-details and run it with call-actor.

Example input an agent can pass:

{
  "videos": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw"
  ],
  "language": "en"
}

Cost per call: $0.0049 per transcript delivered; videos without captions are not charged. Results come back as dataset items (get-dataset-items).

FAQ

How do I download a YouTube transcript as text or SRT? Put the video URL or 11-character ID in videos. Each result contains text, segments with start/end seconds and an srt string you can save as a .srt file.

Can I get YouTube subtitles in another language? Yes: set language to a preference list like de,en, or set translateTo to use YouTube's own caption translation.

What if a video has no captions? You get an error field for that video and it is not charged.

Can I scrape transcripts of many videos at once? Yes, videos takes any number of URLs or IDs (watch, youtu.be, shorts, embed, live).

Related actors

• YouTube Transcript & Audio to Text (Whisper) - SRT/VTT
• Podcast Transcription - RSS Feed to Text, SRT & VTT (coming soon to Apify Store)
• RSS Feed Reader - RSS & Atom to JSON (bulk, auto-discovery) (coming soon to Apify Store)

More examples

Ready-to-run Python, curl and MCP examples with real sample output: https://github.com/AdmiraalA/apify-scrapers-examples