YouTube Video, Shorts, Audio & Transcript Downloader — Playlists & Channels

Download YouTube videos, Shorts, playlists, and entire channels in any quality and format. Extracts subtitles and transcripts in any language. Handles geo-restrictions automatically. Age-restricted videos require providing your YouTube cookies.

Features

• Quality selection — 144p through 4K (2160p), or best for highest available
• Video and audio formats — MP4, WebM, MKV for video; MP3, M4A, Opus for audio-only
• Playlist and channel downloads — paste any playlist or channel URL; optionally cap with maxVideosPerPlaylist
• Subtitles and captions — SRT, VTT, or ASS format; manual or auto-generated; any language
• Transcript-only mode — returns plain text without downloading or storing the video; at $0.001/video it's the cheapest way to extract text from YouTube at scale
• Rich optional metadata — thumbnail URL, view/like/comment counts, description, channel info, fps/codec/bitrate, tags and categories
• Cookie authentication — unlocks age-restricted content using your YouTube session
• Geo-restriction handling — detects which country the video requires and retries through a matching residential proxy automatically

Who uses this

AI and LLM developers — Batch an entire channel and get a dataset of clean transcripts ready for your RAG pipeline, fine-tuning job, or search index.

Content creators and marketers — Download videos in MP4 for repurposing, or pull subtitles to turn any interview into a blog post without manual transcription.

Course creators and educators — Download your published videos with auto-generated captions to repackage them into offline materials or captioned clips.

SEO professionals and researchers — Extract transcripts at scale to analyse competitor messaging, find keyword gaps, or build text datasets without touching a video file.

Podcast and audio producers — Pull MP3 or M4A audio from any video or playlist in one run — no browser extensions, no manual downloads.

Data scientists and academics — Build NLP corpora from lectures, conference talks, and interviews across multiple languages via the API.

Developers building MCP-integrated AI tools — Connect this actor as an MCP server so Claude, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible client can fetch YouTube content in a single tool call.

Pricing

Pay only for what you download. No monthly fee.

Event	Price	When it applies
Video downloaded	$0.006	Per video successfully downloaded
Subtitles	$0.001	Per video when includeSubtitles or subtitlesOnly is enabled

These are the actor fees only. Every run also incurs Apify platform costs billed directly by Apify:

• Residential proxy bandwidth — required for YouTube to work reliably; billed by Apify at $8/GB on Free and Starter plans, $7.50/GB on Scale, and $7/GB on Business. A typical 1080p video is 200–600 MB, so proxy cost dominates for video downloads. Transcript-only mode uses negligible bandwidth since only small subtitle files are transferred.
• Compute — CPU and memory while the actor runs; billed by Apify based on memory allocated and runtime.

Examples

Task	Actor fee	Proxy cost (approx.)
100 videos at 360p	$0.60	~$32 (4 GB × $8)
100 videos at 1080p	$0.60	~$160 (20 GB × $8)
1,000 transcripts only	$1.00	~$0.10

Transcript-only mode is the most cost-effective option when you only need text — proxy cost is near zero since no video is transferred.

Input

{
  "videoUrls": [
    "https://youtu.be/qMquIcJWZag",
    "https://youtube.com/shorts/pRjw_XEwXX4"
  ],
  "playlistUrls": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/@Apify/",
    "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLObrtcm1Kw6Ohp5OC9ymNNBVEgTa2DZuh"
  ],
  "maxVideosPerPlaylist": 2,
  "quality": "1080p",
  "format": "mp4"
}

Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
videoUrls	Array	—	Individual YouTube video or Shorts URLs
playlistUrls	Array	—	Playlist or channel URLs to expand and download
maxVideosPerPlaylist	Integer	All	Max videos per playlist or channel
maxConcurrency	Integer	5	Number of videos to download simultaneously (1–10)
quality	String	1080p	Max quality: best, 2160p, 1440p, 1080p, 720p, 480p, 360p, 240p, 144p
format	String	mp4	Output format: mp4, webm, mkv, mp3, m4a, opus
cookiesText	String	—	YouTube cookies in Netscape format for age-restricted videos
includeSubtitles	Boolean	false	Download captions alongside the video
subtitlesOnly	Boolean	false	Skip video download; return captions only
subtitleLanguages	String	"auto"	"auto" to detect the video's language, or a specific code like "en", "fr", "ar"
subtitleFormat	String	srt	Subtitle file format: srt, vtt, ass
captionOutput	String	"both"	What to store: "both" (subtitle file + transcript), "subtitleFile", or "transcript"
includeThumbnail	Boolean	false	Add thumbnail URL to output
includeStats	Boolean	false	Add view count, like count, and comment count
includeDescription	Boolean	false	Add full video description
includeChannelInfo	Boolean	false	Add channel name, channel URL, and upload date
includeTechnicalInfo	Boolean	false	Add codec, fps, and bitrate
includeTags	Boolean	false	Add tags and categories

At least one of videoUrls or playlistUrls is required. Both can be provided together and are processed in the same run.

Supported URL formats

Videos and Shorts:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID
• https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID (sharing tokens like ?si= are handled automatically)
• https://youtube.com/shorts/pRjw_XEwXX4

Playlists and channels:

• https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAYLIST_ID
• https://www.youtube.com/@Apify
• https://www.youtube.com/@Apify/videos
• https://www.youtube.com/channel/CHANNEL_ID

Subtitles and transcripts

Use subtitleLanguages: "auto" unless you need a specific language — it detects the video's language, prefers manual tracks, falls back to auto-generated, and never hard-fails when captions are absent. Set a specific code like "en" or "fr" if you need an exact language; if unavailable the record will include captions.subtitleError and the list of languages that are available.

Transcript-only mode

Set subtitlesOnly to true to skip the video download entirely and return only transcript text. No video is stored. At $0.001 per video, this is the cheapest option for transcript extraction.

{
  "videoUrls": ["https://youtu.be/qMquIcJWZag"],
  "subtitlesOnly": true,
  "subtitleLanguages": "auto",
  "captionOutput": "transcript"
}

Cookie authentication

Age-restricted videos require YouTube cookies. Export them using the Get cookies.txt LOCALLY extension while logged in, then paste the file contents into cookiesText.

Use a burner account. YouTube can ban the account whose cookies are used. Never use your main account — create a throwaway Google account instead.

Cookies must be in Netscape format. Malformed content will cause the download to fail. Cookies are written to a temp file during the download and deleted immediately after — they are never logged or stored.

Content type	Result
Age-restricted videos	Works with cookies, fails without
Geo-restricted videos	Handled automatically via residential proxy — no cookies needed
Private or members-only videos	Fails regardless of cookies

Output

Each successfully downloaded video produces one dataset record:

{
  "status": "success",
  "videoId": "qMquIcJWZag",
  "title": "Apify in 100 Seconds",
  "sourceUrl": "https://youtu.be/qMquIcJWZag",
  "downloadUrl": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/abc123/records/video_qMquIcJWZag.mp4",
  "format": "mp4",
  "quality": "360p",
  "duration": 995,
  "durationFormatted": "16:35",
  "fileSize": 21385391,
  "fileSizeMB": 20.39,
  "processingTime": 53.25,
  "timestamp": "2026-05-13 13:07:12"
}

For audio-only formats (mp3, m4a, opus), quality is "audio".

In subtitlesOnly mode, downloadUrl, fileSize, and fileSizeMB are omitted.

When captions are enabled, a captions field is added:

{
  "captions": {
    "language": "en",
    "isAutoGenerated": false,
    "subtitleUrl": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/abc123/records/caption_qMquIcJWZag.en.srt",
    "transcriptUrl": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/abc123/records/caption_qMquIcJWZag.en.txt",
    "transcript": "Welcome everyone to the Apify $1 million challenge award ceremony..."
  }
}

If captions are requested in a specific language but unavailable:

{
  "captions": {
    "subtitleError": "No 'en' subtitles available",
    "availableSubtitleLanguages": ["ar", "fr"]
  }
}

Failed downloads are recorded too:

{
  "sourceUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRIVATE_VIDEO",
  "status": "failed",
  "error": "Video unavailable",
  "errorType": "DownloadError"
}

Download links are valid for 7 days on the free plan and 31 days on paid plans. Named storages are retained indefinitely — you can rename a run's storage in Apify Console to prevent it from expiring.

Troubleshooting

Download fails — The video may be private, deleted, or geo-restricted to a region where residential proxies are unavailable. Verify it plays in your browser. Private and members-only videos cannot be downloaded even with cookies.

Quality lower than requested — The actor selects the best available quality up to your maximum. Some older videos top out at 480p or 720p.

Playlist only partially downloaded — Private or region-locked videos fail individually and are recorded with status: "failed". The rest proceed normally.

No captions returned — If using "auto" and the video has no captions at all, the record succeeds with no captions field. YouTube Mix playlists (?list=RD...) are not supported.

Download link expired — Re-run the actor. Links are valid for 7 days (free plan) or 31 days (paid plans). To keep a link permanently, rename the run's storage in Apify Console — named storages never expire.

API integration

You can trigger this actor programmatically from any language or tool that can make HTTP requests. Replace YOUR_API_TOKEN with your Apify API token.

Download videos — Node.js

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_API_TOKEN' });

const run = await client.actor('datapipe/youtube-video-downloader').call({
    videoUrls: [
        'https://youtu.be/qMquIcJWZag',
    ],
    quality: '1080p',
    format: 'mp4',
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();

for (const item of items) {
    if (item.status === 'success') {
        console.log(`${item.title} — ${item.downloadUrl} (${item.fileSizeMB} MB)`);
    } else {
        console.log(`Failed: ${item.sourceUrl} — ${item.error}`);
    }
}

Bulk transcript extraction — Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient('YOUR_API_TOKEN')

# Transcript-only mode — no video stored, costs $0.001/video
run = client.actor('datapipe/youtube-video-downloader').call(run_input={
    'playlistUrls': ['https://www.youtube.com/@Apify/'],
    'maxVideosPerPlaylist': 200,
    'subtitlesOnly': True,
    'subtitleLanguages': 'auto',
    'captionOutput': 'transcript',
})

items = client.dataset(run['defaultDatasetId']).list_items().items
transcripts = [
    {'title': item['title'], 'text': item['captions']['transcript']}
    for item in items
    if item['status'] == 'success' and item.get('captions', {}).get('transcript')
]
# Feed into your RAG pipeline, fine-tuning job, or search index

cURL

# Start a run
curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/datapipe~youtube-video-downloader/runs?token=YOUR_API_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "videoUrls": ["https://youtu.be/qMquIcJWZag"],
    "quality": "1080p",
    "format": "mp4",
    "includeSubtitles": true,
    "subtitleLanguages": "auto"
  }'

# Fetch results (replace DATASET_ID with defaultDatasetId from the response above)
curl "https://api.apify.com/v2/datasets/DATASET_ID/items?token=YOUR_API_TOKEN"

Support

Open a ticket via Apify Console or use the Issues tab on the actor page.