YouTube Transcript Extractor

Get clean YouTube transcripts in a few clicks.
This Actor extracts available captions from YouTube videos and returns them as structured JSON, full transcript text, or both — perfect for research, AI workflows, archiving, and content analysis.

Features

• Extracts transcripts from YouTube videos
• Supports multiple video URLs in one run
• Falls back to auto-generated captions when needed
• Returns timestamped caption segments

Proxies

Proxies are heavly sugest to avoid gettin blocked by YouTube

Output

Depending on settings, the Actor returns one or both of these:

1. captions_json

Array of caption segments.

Each item contains:

• start — start time in seconds
• end — end time in seconds
• duration — segment duration in seconds
• text — cleaned caption text

Example:

[
  {
    "start": "0.000",
    "end": "2.400",
    "duration": "2.400",
    "text": "Welcome to the video."
  }
]

2. full_transcript

Single merged transcript string.

Example:

{
  "full_transcript": "Welcome to the video."
}

Example enriched output

{
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID",
  "video_id": "VIDEO_ID",
  "title": "Example Video",
  "uploader": "Example Channel",
  "duration_seconds": 523,
  "subtitle_language": "en",
  "subtitle_source": "manual",
  "captions_json": [
    {
      "start": "0.000",
      "end": "2.100",
      "duration": "2.100",
      "text": "Hello everyone."
    }
  ],
  "full_transcript": "Hello everyone."
}

Error handling

The Actor reports issues such as:

• invalid YouTube URL
• no subtitles available in the selected language
• processing failure for a specific video

When subtitles are missing, the result may also include available subtitle languages.

Notes

• Supports standard YouTube video URLs
• Does not support YouTube Shorts
• Does not support YouTube Music links
• Output depends on subtitle availability on the original video
• Auto captions may be less accurate than manual subtitles

Example input

{
  "urls": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID_1",
    "https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID_2"
  ],
  "saveCaptionsJson": true,
  "saveFullTranscript": true,
  "subtitleLanguage": "en",
  "saveRichDataset": true
}