YouTube Transcript Scraper: Videos, Channels, Playlists & Search

Get YouTube transcripts and subtitles in bulk. Paste video URLs, a whole channel, a playlist, or just search terms. You get clean transcripts as plain text, timestamped segments, SRT or VTT, plus video metadata (title, channel, duration, views, description, tags). You pay only for videos that actually have a transcript.

• ✅ Any input: video URLs or IDs, Shorts, @handles, channel URLs, playlists, search queries.
• ✅ 5 output formats: readable paragraphs, [hh:mm:ss] timestamped text, JSON segments, SRT, WebVTT.
• ✅ Smart language choice: your preferred languages in order, human-made captions before auto-generated ones, optional fallback to whatever is available.
• ✅ Video metadata included at no extra cost.
• ✅ Reliable: switches to a proxy automatically only when YouTube starts rate-limiting, so runs stay fast and cheap.
• 💲 $3 per 1,000 transcripts. Videos without captions are free.

Use cases

• AI and LLM pipelines: feed transcripts into RAG, summarization, chatbots and fine-tuning datasets.
• Content repurposing: turn videos into blog posts, newsletters, show notes and social posts.
• Research and monitoring: analyze what creators, competitors or experts say across hundreds of videos.
• SEO: mine keywords and questions from videos in your niche.
• Subtitles: download SRT or VTT files for editing, translation or archiving.

Input

Field	What it does
YouTube URLs	Videos, Shorts, channels (@mkbhd, youtube.com/channel/UC…), playlists (youtube.com/playlist?list=…).
Search queries	Get transcripts for the top results of any YouTube search.
Max videos per source	Limit per channel, playlist or search (0 = all).
Channel content	Videos, Shorts or Live streams tab.
Preferred languages	e.g. en, es, de, in priority order.
Output formats	Any of text, timestampedText, segments, srt, vtt.

{
    "urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ", "@mkbhd"],
    "searchQueries": ["sourdough recipe"],
    "maxVideosPerSource": 20,
    "languages": ["en"],
    "outputFormats": ["text", "segments", "srt"]
}

Output

{
    "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "title": "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Official Video) (4K Remaster)",
    "channelName": "Rick Astley",
    "channelId": "UCuAXFkgsw1L7xaCfnd5JJOw",
    "durationSeconds": 213,
    "viewCount": 1821086987,
    "description": "The official video for “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley...",
    "keywords": ["rick astley", "never gonna give you up"],
    "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dQw4w9WgXcQ/maxresdefault.jpg",
    "availableLanguages": [{ "languageCode": "en", "name": "English", "isAutoGenerated": false }],
    "transcriptAvailable": true,
    "language": "en",
    "isAutoGenerated": false,
    "wordCount": 487,
    "text": "[♪♪♪] ♪ We're no strangers to love ♪ ♪ You know the rules and so do I ♪ ...",
    "segments": [
        { "start": 1.36, "duration": 1.68, "text": "[♪♪♪]" },
        { "start": 18.64, "duration": 3.24, "text": "♪ We're no strangers to love ♪" }
    ],
    "srt": "1\n00:00:01,360 --> 00:00:03,040\n[♪♪♪]\n...",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-09-28T21:10:00.000Z"
}

A video without captions gives a free row with transcriptAvailable: false and an error explaining why (you can turn these rows off).

Pricing

$0.003 per transcript ($3 per 1,000), with metadata included. Nothing is charged for videos without a transcript. Set a maximum cost per run and the Actor stops cleanly when it's reached.

Tips

• Whole channel: paste the @handle and set Max videos per source to 0.
• Only auto-generated captions? Turn off Prefer human-made captions to take whatever YouTube shows first.
• Integrations: send transcripts to Google Sheets, Notion, Slack, Zapier, Make or n8n, or call the Actor from your own code through the Apify API. It also works as a tool for AI agents through the Apify MCP server.

FAQ

Does it work for videos without captions? No. It reads YouTube's own caption tracks (uploader-made or auto-generated). Nearly all spoken videos in major languages have auto-generated captions.

Are playlists limited? Playlists return up to 200 videos. Channels have no limit.

Is it legal? The Actor reads publicly available captions and metadata. You're responsible for how you use the content, including copyright.