YouTube Playlist Transcript Scraper — whole playlists, one run

Give it a playlist. Get back the transcript of every video in it, in playlist order. Built for courses, tutorial series and conference tracks.

Bulk transcripts from a YouTube playlist

• Download all transcripts from a YouTube playlist
• Export a full course playlist to JSON or CSV
• Get subtitles for every video in a tutorial series
• Build a RAG dataset from a conference playlist
• Scrape playlist captions without an API key

Pass several playlists at once. Each row is tagged with its source playlist.

Why this one works

Many transcript tools broke when YouTube started requiring proof-of-origin tokens on caption URLs — they return empty results or fail silently. This scraper uses a fallback ladder of client identities, retries on a fresh IP when an exit node is blocked, and reports which route served each result.

You only pay for transcripts

reason	Meaning	Charged
— (ok: true)	Transcript returned	Yes
no-captions	Video is fine, has no captions	No
unavailable	Deleted, private, or region-locked	No
blocked	Extraction route failed	No

Long-running playlists accumulate dead and caption-less videos. Those cost you nothing.

Input

Field	Required	Description
playlists	yes	Playlist URLs or IDs
maxVideosPerPlaylist	no	Playlist order. Default 100. Your cost ceiling.
language	no	Two-letter code. Default en.
includeSegments	no	Add timestamps. Default false.
maxConcurrency	no	1–25. Default 10.

Accepts youtube.com/playlist?list=PL..., a watch URL carrying a list param, or a bare PL... / UU... id.

Example input

{
  "playlists": ["https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTt2d9bfVyTiXJA-UTHn6WwU"],
  "maxVideosPerPlaylist": 200,
  "language": "en"
}

Output

Every row has the same fields whether it succeeded or failed, so you can select columns without branching. Failed rows are never charged.

Field	Type	Description
sourcePlaylist	string	The playlist input this row came from.
success	boolean	True when a transcript was returned. Failed rows are never charged.
videoId	string	YouTube's 11-character video identifier.
videoUrl	string	Canonical watch URL for the video.
title	string	The video's title as published.
channel	string	Display name of the channel that published the video.
channelId	string	YouTube channel identifier, stable across renames.
durationSeconds	number	Length of the video in seconds.
viewCount	integer	Views at the time of the run.
language	string	BCP-47 code of the caption track returned.
isAutoGenerated	boolean	True when the captions were machine-generated rather than human-authored.
segmentCount	integer	Number of timed segments in the transcript.
fullText	string	The complete transcript as one plain-text string. Null on failure.
segments	array	Timestamped transcript segments. Only present when includeSegments is enabled.
errorCode	string	Machine-readable failure reason. Null on success.
errorMessage	string	Human-readable explanation of the failure. Null on success.

Example — success

{
  "sourcePlaylist": "PLUl4u3cNGP63EdVPNLG3ToM6LftOCAY1H",
  "success": true,
  "videoId": "jNQXAC9IVRw",
  "videoUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw",
  "title": "Me at the zoo",
  "channel": "jawed",
  "channelId": "UC4QobU6STFB0P71PMvOGN5A",
  "viewCount": 358194821,
  "durationSeconds": 19,
  "language": "en",
  "isAutoGenerated": false,
  "segmentCount": 3,
  "fullText": "All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants. The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks.",
  "errorCode": null,
  "errorMessage": null,
  "segments": [
    {
      "start": 0.84,
      "duration": 3.2,
      "text": "All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants."
    },
    {
      "start": 4.04,
      "duration": 3.6,
      "text": "The cool thing about these guys is that they have"
    },
    {
      "start": 7.64,
      "duration": 2.9,
      "text": "really, really, really long trunks."
    }
  ]
}

Example — failure

A failure carries the same fields, so nothing downstream has to branch.

{
  "sourcePlaylist": "PLUl4u3cNGP63EdVPNLG3ToM6LftOCAY1H",
  "success": false,
  "videoId": "s1CFmzZzO4c",
  "videoUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1CFmzZzO4c",
  "title": "Board meeting recording",
  "channel": "Example Corp",
  "channelId": "UCzzz999",
  "viewCount": 412,
  "durationSeconds": 3120,
  "language": null,
  "isAutoGenerated": null,
  "segmentCount": null,
  "fullText": null,
  "errorCode": "no-captions",
  "errorMessage": "This video has no captions published, so there is no transcript to return."
}

Error codes

• no-captions
• unavailable
• blocked
• empty-transcript
• unparseable-input
• error
• unparseable-playlist
• playlist-blocked

Use it for

• Course transcripts — every lesson in a curriculum playlist, as plain text
• Conference talk transcripts — a whole conference track in one run
• Lecture transcripts — university series and seminar playlists
• Podcast transcripts — YouTube-hosted podcast back catalogues
• Seminar and webinar series transcripts — a full recorded programme
• RAG and embedding pipelines over a curated series
• Study notes, summaries and training datasets

Related actors

If you need	Use
Specific videos you already have URLs for	YouTube Transcript Scraper
Every video on a channel	YouTube Channel Transcript Scraper
A channel's Shorts	YouTube Shorts Transcript Scraper
Videos from a keyword search	YouTube Search to Transcripts
Comments instead of the spoken text	YouTube Comments Scraper

Use it from an AI agent (MCP)

This Actor is callable as a tool through the Apify MCP server, so Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and VS Code can run it directly.

Add the server to your MCP client:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer <YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>"
      }
    }
  }
}

Then ask for what you want in plain language — for example “transcribe this YouTube playlist” — and the agent calls cleanfeed/youtube-playlist-transcript-downloader with the right input. Every output field is described in the dataset schema, so the agent knows what it is getting back before it runs anything.

Call it from code

Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")

run = client.actor("cleanfeed/youtube-playlist-transcript-downloader").call(run_input={
    "playlists": ["https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTt2d9bfVyTiXJA-UTHn6WwU"],
})

for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    if item["success"]:
        print(item)

JavaScript

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: '<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>' });

const run = await client.actor('cleanfeed/youtube-playlist-transcript-downloader').call({
    playlists: ["https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTt2d9bfVyTiXJA-UTHn6WwU"],
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items.filter((i) => i.success));

cURL

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/cleanfeed~youtube-playlist-transcript-downloader/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"playlists": ["https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTt2d9bfVyTiXJA-UTHn6WwU"]}'

Limitations

• A residential proxy is required. YouTube serves playabilityStatus: ERROR to datacenter IP ranges while the identical request succeeds from a home connection — measured 12/12 success on residential against 0/12 on a cloud host with no proxy, and 7/12 through a datacenter proxy. The input defaults to residential; changing it will break most runs. Full method and per-environment figures are published in the reliability benchmark.
• Not every video has captions. Videos with captions disabled return errorCode: no-captions and are never charged. This is a property of the video, not a failure of the run.
• The playlist must be public. Private and unlisted playlists return no videos.
• Some playlist pages list zero videos through the playlist endpoint even though they render in a browser; the run reports 0 videos found rather than failing silently.

FAQ

Do I need a YouTube API key?

No key, no OAuth and no quota.

What playlist formats are accepted?

A playlist URL, a bare PL... id, or a watch URL carrying a &list= parameter.

Can I transcribe a whole channel instead?

Yes — use YouTube Channel Transcript Scraper.

What if some videos in the playlist have no captions?

Those rows return errorCode: no-captions and are not charged. The rest of the playlist still returns normally.

Is this suitable for courses and conference tracks?

That is the main use case. One run returns the whole series as text, with optional timestamps so you can cite the moment a point was made.

Notes

Only publicly available caption data is collected. No login, no personal data, no video downloads.