YouTube Transcript Scraper — bulk, no cap, LLM-ready

Extract transcripts from thousands of YouTube videos in one run. Plain text for embeddings, timestamped segments for search and clipping. No YouTube API key, no quota, no per-video rate-limit dance.

Extract YouTube transcripts in bulk

Pass a whole channel's worth of video IDs and get clean JSON back. Built for people filling a vector store or a dataset, not for copying one transcript by hand.

• Download YouTube transcripts to JSON or CSV
• Get YouTube subtitles with timestamps
• Extract transcripts from a list of YouTube URLs
• Scrape YouTube captions without a YouTube API key
• Bulk export YouTube video transcripts for AI training

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 and reports which one served each result, so you get a transcript where other tools return nothing.

Honest failure reporting

Every item tells you exactly what happened, and you are only charged for transcripts actually delivered:

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

Feeding in a large list of older videos? Dead entries cost you nothing, and you can tell a caption-less video apart from a deleted one.

Language fallback

Ask for nl and it prefers a human-written Dutch track, falls back to auto-generated Dutch, then to any track that exists. Most scrapers return nothing when the exact language is missing.

Input

Field	Required	Description
videos	yes	Watch URLs, youtu.be links, shorts, live, embed URLs, or bare 11-character IDs
language	no	Two-letter code. Default en.
includeSegments	no	Include timestamps. Default true.
maxConcurrency	no	Parallel requests, 1–25. Default 8.

Example input

{
  "videos": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw",
    "kJQP7kiw5Fk"
  ],
  "language": "en",
  "includeSegments": true
}

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
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

{
  "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 still identifies the video, so you can act on it without a second lookup.

{
  "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

Use it for

• YouTube transcript JSON — structured output for pipelines, not a caption file
• Podcast transcripts — YouTube-hosted episodes in bulk
• Video transcript bulk export — thousands of videos in a single run
• Interview transcripts — podcast and long-form interview episodes
• Webinar and meeting transcripts — anything recorded and posted to YouTube
• Earnings call transcripts — investor calls published on a company channel
• RAG and embedding pipelines, semantic video search
• Accessibility, subtitles and content repurposing
• Competitor content analysis and training datasets

Related actors

If you need	Use
Every video on a channel	YouTube Channel Transcript Scraper
Every video in a playlist	YouTube Playlist Transcript Scraper
A channel's Shorts	YouTube Shorts Transcript Scraper
Videos you have not picked yet, from a keyword	YouTube Search to Transcripts
Comments instead of the spoken text	YouTube Comments Scraper

Pricing

Pay per transcript returned. Videos without captions, deleted videos, and failed fetches cost nothing.

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 “get the transcript of this YouTube video” — and the agent calls cleanfeed/youtube-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-transcript-downloader").call(run_input={
    "videos": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw"],
})

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-transcript-downloader').call({
    videos: ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw"],
});

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-transcript-downloader/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"videos": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw"]}'

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.
• Captions are read, not generated. There is no speech-to-text fallback — if YouTube publishes no caption track, no transcript exists to return.

FAQ

Do I need a YouTube API key?

No. This does not use the YouTube Data API, so there is no key, no OAuth and no daily quota. The official API also cannot return auto-generated captions at all, which is most of what exists.

Why does my own script work locally but fail on a server?

YouTube blocks datacenter IP ranges. The same request that succeeds from your laptop returns playabilityStatus: ERROR from AWS, GCP or Azure. This Actor routes through residential egress by default, which is the fix. There is a symptom-by-symptom walkthrough in this diagnostic guide.

What happens to videos without captions?

They return errorCode: no-captions with a readable errorMessage, and are never charged. Failed rows carry the same fields as successful ones, so nothing downstream has to branch.

Can I get timestamps?

Yes — set includeSegments: true and each row gains a segments array of { text, start, duration }. It is off by default because it multiplies payload size.

Is there speech-to-text for videos with no captions?

No. This reads the caption tracks YouTube publishes. If a video has none, there is nothing to return and you are not charged for it.

Notes

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