Youtube Channel Videos Scraper

Extract a channel's videos at scale — latest uploads, popular videos, filtered ranges. Uses YouTube Data API v3 for fast, reliable extraction with pagination up to thousands of videos per channel. No browser or proxy required.

Key Features

• Channel resolution — Accepts @handle, channel URL, /channel/UC..., /c/custom, /user/legacy
• Deep pagination — Extract up to 5,000 videos per channel via uploads playlist
• Statistics enrichment — Views, likes, comments via batched videos.list API calls
• Content details — Duration, HD/SD, caption flags, licensed content, topic categories
• Shorts & Live detection — Automatic classification based on duration and broadcast content
• Date filtering — Filter by publish date range (startDate / endDate)
• Sorting — Newest, oldest, or most popular (by view count)
• Multi-channel — Process multiple channels in a single run with cross-channel deduplication
• Full enrichment — Descriptions, tags, thumbnails, and topic categories included by default
• Lightweight — No browser needed — runs on apify/actor-node:22
• Reliable — Graceful per-channel error handling, partial result output, and detailed run summary

How It Works

1. Resolve channel — Convert @handle, URL, or channelId to a canonical channelId via channels.list
2. Get uploads playlist — Fetch the channel's uploads playlist ID via contentDetails
3. Paginate playlist — Extract video IDs via playlistItems.list (50 per page, up to 5,000)
4. Enrich videos — Batch enrich with videos.list (50 per call) for stats, duration, descriptions, tags, and topics
5. Filter & sort — Apply date range, Shorts/Live toggles, and sort order
6. Output — Push clean per-video records to dataset + write RUN_SUMMARY.json

---

Input

Channel Settings

Field	Type	Default	Description
channelRefs	string[]	required	Channel references: @handle, channel URL, /channel/UC..., /c/customURL
maxVideosPerChannel	integer	200	Max videos per channel (1–5,000)
includeShorts	boolean	true	Include YouTube Shorts (videos ≤60 seconds)
includeLive	boolean	false	Include live streams and premieres

Filtering & Sorting

Field	Type	Default	Description
startDate	string	""	Include videos published on/after this date (YYYY-MM-DD)
endDate	string	""	Include videos published on/before this date (YYYY-MM-DD)
sortBy	string	"newest"	newest / oldest / popular (popular sorts by view count)
dedupeAcrossChannels	boolean	true	Skip duplicate videos across channels

Enrichment Options

Field	Type	Default	Description
includeStatistics	boolean	true	Add view count, like count, and comment count
includeContentDetails	boolean	true	Add duration, definition (HD/SD), caption flags
includeThumbnails	boolean	true	Add thumbnail URLs (default, medium, high, maxres)
includeDescription	boolean	true	Include full video description
includeTags	boolean	true	Include video tags

Advanced Settings

Field	Type	Default	Description
youtubeApiKey	string	""	Optional user-provided YouTube Data API v3 key
maxConcurrency	integer	10	Reserved for future use (v1 processes sequentially)
maxRetries	integer	3	Retries for transient API errors
minDelayMs	integer	0	Delay between channels (milliseconds)
debug	boolean	false	Enable verbose logging

---

Input Examples

Example 1 — Latest 200 videos with lightweight output

Fetch the latest 200 videos from a single channel with statistics and content details, but without descriptions and tags for a smaller output size.

{
  "channelRefs": [
    "@mkbhd"
  ],
  "debug": false,
  "dedupeAcrossChannels": true,
  "includeContentDetails": true,
  "includeDescription": false,
  "includeLive": false,
  "includeShorts": true,
  "includeStatistics": true,
  "includeTags": false,
  "includeThumbnails": true,
  "maxVideosPerChannel": 200,
  "sortBy": "newest",
  "maxConcurrency": 10,
  "maxRetries": 3,
  "minDelayMs": 0
}

Example 2 — Full enrichment with all fields

Fetch the latest 200 videos from a channel URL with all enrichment options enabled, including descriptions, tags, thumbnails, and live streams.

{
  "channelRefs": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/@graceleungyl"
  ],
  "debug": false,
  "dedupeAcrossChannels": true,
  "includeContentDetails": true,
  "includeDescription": true,
  "includeLive": true,
  "includeShorts": true,
  "includeStatistics": true,
  "includeTags": true,
  "includeThumbnails": true,
  "maxVideosPerChannel": 200,
  "sortBy": "newest",
  "maxConcurrency": 10,
  "maxRetries": 3,
  "minDelayMs": 0
}

---

Output

Each video is a flat JSON record with up to 26 fields.

Output Fields

Field	Type	Description
retrievedAt	string	Fetch timestamp (ISO 8601)
channelId	string	Channel ID
channelTitle	string	Channel name
channelHandle	string	@handle
channelUrl	string	Canonical channel URL
videoId	string	Video ID
videoUrl	string	Watch URL or /shorts/ URL
title	string	Video title
publishedAt	string	Publish timestamp (ISO 8601)
publishDate	string	YYYY-MM-DD
duration	string	ISO 8601 duration (e.g., PT12M36S)
durationSeconds	integer	Duration in seconds
isShorts	boolean	Shorts flag (duration ≤60s)
isLive	boolean	Live/premiere indicator
viewCount	integer	Views
likeCount	integer	Likes (may be hidden)
commentCount	integer	Comments (may be disabled)
thumbnails	object	Thumbnail URLs (default/medium/high/standard/maxres)
description	string	Full video description
tags	string[]	Video tags
definition	string	hd / sd
caption	string	true / false
licensedContent	boolean	Licensing flag
topicCategories	string[]	Wikipedia topic category URLs
source	string	api or api_partial
runId	string	Apify run ID

Output Example

---

Performance

Scenario	Typical Time
1 channel x 200 videos	~30–90 seconds
10 channels x 200 videos	~5–15 minutes
1 channel x 5,000 videos	~10–40 minutes

---

Run Summary

Each run saves RUN_SUMMARY.json to the Key-Value Store with:

• Total channels processed / failed
• Total videos emitted
• Per-channel video counts
• Errors by channel
• API call count and per-key quota usage
• Start and completion timestamps

---

Use Cases

• Competitor analysis — Export and compare video catalogs across channels
• Content audits — Analyze upload frequency, Shorts vs long-form ratio, and engagement
• Dataset generation — Build research datasets of niche channels
• Marketing research — Identify trending topics and high-performing content
• Monitoring & alerts — Track new uploads from partner/influencer channels
• Watchlist building — Create video lists for further scraping (comments, transcripts, etc.)

---

Limitations

• Uploads playlist only — Private and unlisted videos are excluded (YouTube API limitation)
• Shorts detection — Based on duration heuristic (≤60s); may not catch all edge cases
• Live detection — Only detects currently live or upcoming; past live streams show as false
• Hidden stats — Like count and comment count may be null if the creator has hidden them
• Sequential processing — Channels are processed one at a time in v1 (concurrent processing planned for v1.1)

---

Support & Feedback

If you encounter any issues or have feature requests, please open an issue on GitHub.