YouTube Transcript Scraper — Bulk Video to Text

Extract transcripts, subtitles and closed captions from YouTube videos in bulk — clean, structured, and cheap. Paste video URLs (or just video IDs), get back timestamped segments and the full plain-text transcript for every video. No YouTube API key, no quota, no browser automation.

~$2 per 1,000 videos — and videos with no transcript are skipped, not charged. No data, no charge.

Why this one

• Built for bulk — paste hundreds or thousands of URLs in one run; videos are processed concurrently with automatic retries and rotating proxy sessions
• No data = no charge — videos with captions disabled, unavailable videos, and age-restricted videos are skipped and never billed as results. Competing actors charge you for empty rows
• Any URL shape — full watch?v= URLs, youtu.be short links, Shorts, embeds, live URLs, or bare 11-character video IDs
• Language-smart — give a preference order (en, de, pt …); the actor takes the best match (human-created transcripts first) and gracefully falls back to whatever language the video actually has, so you always get a transcript when one exists

Who uses this data

• AI / LLM pipelines — turn videos into training data, RAG knowledge bases, embeddings, or summarisation inputs at scale
• Content repurposing — convert videos into blog posts, newsletters, show notes, and social snippets
• Research & analysis — study interviews, lectures, earnings calls, podcasts and news coverage as searchable text
• SEO & competitive intel — mine competitor channels for topics, keywords and hooks that work

What you get

One record per video:

Field	Example
videoId	jNQXAC9IVRw
url	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw
title	Me at the zoo
language / languageCode	English / en
isAutoGenerated	false
segments	[{ "start": 1.2, "duration": 2.16, "text": "All right, so here we are…" }, …]
plainText	The full transcript joined into one clean string
wordCount / segmentCount	39 / 6

Choose segments, plainText, or both (default) via the Output format option.

Input example

{
    "videoUrls": [
        "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw",
        "https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ",
        "9bZkp7q19f0"
    ],
    "languages": ["en"],
    "includeAutoGenerated": true,
    "outputFormat": "both"
}

Languages

Works with every language YouTube supports — both human-created subtitles and auto-generated captions. Set languages as a preference order; turn includeAutoGenerated off if you only want human-created transcripts.

Videos without transcripts

Some videos have captions disabled, are unavailable, or are age-restricted. These are skipped: they don't appear in the dataset and are not charged. The run log and status message report exactly how many were skipped.

Proxy

YouTube blocks most datacenter IPs, so the actor defaults to Apify residential proxies — this is what makes the 100%-reliability bulk runs possible. Leave the default proxy configuration unless you know what you're doing.

Export & integrations

Results land in an Apify dataset — export CSV, Excel, JSON, or connect Google Sheets, Make, Zapier, Slack, and webhooks via Apify integrations.

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Need something more custom? Channel-level scraping, transcript summarisation, keyword extraction, translation, or a fully managed video-to-text pipeline — message me via my Apify profile and I'll build it.