YouTube Transcript Scraper (Videos, Playlists, Channels)

What does YouTube Transcript Scraper do?

It gets the transcript (captions) of YouTube videos in bulk, as clean text, timestamped segments and SRT subtitles, together with the video's title, channel, views, duration and description.

• 🎬 Works with videos, Shorts, playlists, whole channels and YouTube search. Paste any mix of URLs.
• 🌍 100+ languages: pick your preferred languages; human captions win over auto-generated ones
• ⏱️ Full text, timestamped segments and optional SRT file per video
• 💲 $2 per 1,000 transcripts, and you pay only when a transcript is found. Videos without captions, private or deleted videos cost nothing.
• ⚡ No API key, no login, no setup. Reliable at scale.

Use cases

• Feed videos into ChatGPT, Claude or your RAG / AI agent for summaries, Q&A and notes
• Turn a channel or playlist into blog posts, newsletters or course notes
• SEO and content research: what competitors say in their videos
• Build datasets for NLP, sentiment and topic analysis
• Create subtitles (SRT) for re-editing videos

Input

{
  "urls": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk",
    "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rMiGQp3WXShtMGgzqpfVfbU",
    "https://www.youtube.com/@mkbhd"
  ],
  "searchQueries": ["how to make sourdough"],
  "maxVideosPerSource": 50,
  "languages": "en, es",
  "includeTimestamps": true,
  "includeSrt": false
}

Channels return their newest videos first. Max videos per playlist, channel or search caps how many videos each one adds.

Output

{
  "videoId": "aircAruvnKk",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk",
  "title": "But what is a neural network? | Deep learning chapter 1",
  "channelName": "3Blue1Brown",
  "channelId": "UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw",
  "durationSeconds": 1120,
  "viewCount": 24852838,
  "keywords": ["neural networks", "machine learning"],
  "description": "What are the neurons, why are there layers...",
  "availableLanguages": ["ar", "de", "en", "es", "fr"],
  "language": "en",
  "languageName": "English",
  "isAutoGenerated": false,
  "wordCount": 3357,
  "transcript": "This is a 3. It's sloppily written and rendered at an extremely low resolution...",
  "segments": [
    { "start": 4.22, "duration": 1.18, "text": "This is a 3." }
  ],
  "error": null
}

When a video has no captions, the row still lists its metadata with error explaining why, and it is not charged.

Export as JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML, or call it from Make, Zapier, n8n, LangChain or any MCP client through the Apify API.

Pricing

$0.002 per transcript found ($2 per 1,000). Platform and proxy costs are included. Videos without a transcript are free.

Notes

• The transcript comes from the captions YouTube shows for the video (made by the creator or auto-generated). Videos without any captions have no transcript.
• Age-restricted, private and members-only videos can't be read.

More tools from this developer

• YouTube Scraper: videos, Shorts, channels and search with views, likes and dates
• YouTube Comments Scraper: comments and replies, $1 per 1,000
• Google Trends Scraper: interest over time, regions, rising queries
• Google News Scraper: news articles with real publisher URLs

Feedback

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