YouTube Video Scraper

Extract comprehensive metadata from YouTube videos — simply provide video URLs and get structured, ready-to-use data. No YouTube API key required.

Features

• Full video metadata — title, description, duration, upload date, view count, like count, comment count, and availability status
• Transcripts & subtitles — full transcript text with timed segments, plus a list of all available subtitle languages (manual and auto-generated)
• Hashtags & tags — hashtags extracted from the title and description, along with the video's own tags and categories
• Thumbnails — the default thumbnail plus all available thumbnail resolutions with dimensions
• Channel information — channel name, ID, URL, handle, subscriber count, and verification status
• Multi-video support — scrape several videos in one run with parallel processing
• No API key needed — works out of the box with zero configuration

How it works

1. Provide one or more YouTube video URLs
2. The Actor visits each video and collects all available data
3. Results are pushed to the dataset as clean, structured JSON — one item per video

Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
startUrls	array	✔️	—	YouTube video URLs to scrape, e.g. {"url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=..."}
includeTranscript	boolean	❌	true	Fetch the transcript text and timed segments
subtitleLanguage	string	❌	"en"	Preferred transcript/subtitle language code (e.g. en, es, de)
proxyConfiguration	object	❌	—	Proxy settings — recommended when running on the Apify platform

Example input

{
    "startUrls": [
        { "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ" }
    ],
    "includeTranscript": true,
    "subtitleLanguage": "en"
}

Output

Each scraped video produces one JSON item in the dataset.

Output fields

Field	Description
id	YouTube video ID
url	Canonical video URL
title	Video title
description	Full video description
hashtags	Hashtags found in title/description
tags	Tags set by the channel
categories	YouTube content categories
thumbnail / thumbnails	Thumbnail URLs with dimensions
viewCount / likeCount / commentCount	Engagement statistics
duration / durationString	Duration in seconds and m:ss format
uploadDate / releaseDate / releaseTimestamp	Publication dates
channel	Channel name, ID, URL, handle, subscribers, verified status
isLive / ageLimit / availability	Stream, restriction, and visibility status
subtitleLanguages	Available manual and auto-generated caption languages
transcript	Full transcript text, language, source type, and timed segments

Notes & limitations

• If a requested subtitle language isn't available, the Actor falls back to the best available alternative
• Videos that fail to process (e.g. removed or region-locked) are logged and recorded in the dataset with an error field, so one bad URL won't stop the whole run
• Using a proxy is recommended when running on Apify's platform, as YouTube may block datacenter IPs
• Output prices, view counts, and availability are only as current as the moment of scraping

Use cases

• Content analysis and trend research
• SEO & hashtag research
• Media monitoring
• Building video datasets for machine learning
• Archiving video metadata