📝 YouTube Transcript Scraper - Captions, Timestamps, Any Language

Get the transcript of any YouTube video (captions: uploaded or auto-generated) as clean text, as timestamped lines and as segments with start time and duration. Give video URLs (watch, youtu.be, Shorts, live), or channels (transcripts of their latest videos) or search queries (transcripts of the top results). No API key, no login, no browser, no YouTube account.

Each row also has the video's title, channel, channel ID, duration, views, publish date, category, description and keywords, the list of available caption languages, and flags for auto-generated captions and translation.

• Languages: give your preferred languages in order (["es", "en"]); human captions are preferred over auto-generated ones; it falls back to the video's own language and tells you (requestedLanguageMissing).
• Translation: translateTo: "es" uses YouTube's machine translation when YouTube allows it.
• Reliable on servers: when YouTube asks a server IP to "sign in", the video is retried from fresh Apify Proxy IPs automatically.

📥 Input

Field	Meaning
videos	video URLs or IDs
channels, maxVideosPerChannel	transcripts of a channel's latest videos
searchQueries, maxVideosPerSearch	transcripts of search results
languages, translateTo, preferManual	language choice
includeTimestamps, includeSegments	output shape

{ "videos": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"], "channels": ["@mkbhd"], "maxVideosPerChannel": 20, "languages": ["en"] }

📤 Output (one video, shortened)

{ "videoId": "jNQXAC9IVRw", "title": "Me at the zoo", "channel": "jawed", "durationSeconds": 19, "views": 380000000,
  "publishDate": "2005-04-23", "language": "en", "isAutoGenerated": false, "wordCount": 39,
  "transcript": "All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants ...",
  "transcriptWithTimestamps": "[0:01] All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants\n[0:05] the cool thing about these guys ...",
  "segments": [{"start": 1.2, "duration": 2.16, "text": "All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants"}],
  "availableLanguages": [{"code": "en", "name": "English", "autoGenerated": false}] }

💡 Uses

• AI and RAG: feed video knowledge into LLMs, chatbots and search; summarize channels.
• Content repurposing: turn videos into blog posts, newsletters, threads and show notes.
• Research and monitoring: what creators and competitors say, searchable and quotable with timestamps.
• SEO and accessibility: text versions of your own videos.

💰 Pricing

Pay per transcript returned (transcript event). Videos without captions, private or invalid videos are free.

🤖 API / agents

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/centorprat~youtube-transcript-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"videos": ["https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw"]}'

MCP: https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=actors,docs,centorprat/youtube-transcript-scraper

❓ FAQ

• API key or login? No.
• Videos without captions? You get a no_transcript row and are not charged.
• Large runs? Keep Apify Proxy on; Residential proxy is the most reliable for thousands of videos.