YouTube Transcript Scraper

Get the full transcript of any YouTube video that has captions — plus the title, channel, view count and duration — as JSON, CSV or Excel.

Paste a URL in any format. No API key, no login, no quota.

Why this one

• You are never charged for a video without captions. Most scrapers in this category bill per dataset row, so a failed lookup still costs you. Here a video with no transcript is reported so you can see it, and billed at zero
• Video metadata included — title, channel, channel ID, duration, view count and whether it was a livestream. No second lookup needed
• Every URL shape works — watch?v=, youtu.be, Shorts, /embed/, /live/, or a bare 11-character ID
• Human captions preferred over auto-generated, and the output tells you which one you got
• Timestamps optional — plain text by default, or a full cue list with start and duration per line

Quick start

{
  "videos": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw",
    "9bZkp7q19f0"
  ]
}

With options:

{
  "videos": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"],
  "language": "en",
  "includeTimestamps": true,
  "skipVideosWithoutTranscript": true
}

Input

Field	What it does
videos	URLs or IDs. Any YouTube URL format is accepted
language	Preferred caption language (en, fr, es…). Empty = best available
includeTimestamps	Adds a cues array with start, duration and text per line
skipVideosWithoutTranscript	Omit captionless videos entirely instead of reporting them
proxyConfiguration	Leave on residential. See the proxy section below

If you ask for a language the video does not have, the run tells you which languages are available rather than quietly returning a different one.

Output

Field	Description
videoId / url	Video identity
title / channel / channelId	Video and uploader
durationSeconds / viewCount / isLive	Video stats
transcript	Full text, one string
cues *	[{start, duration, text}] per caption line
cueCount / characterCount	Size of the transcript
language / languageName	Caption track used
isAutoGenerated	Whether captions were machine-made
availableLanguages	Every caption language the video offers

* only with includeTimestamps

{
  "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "title": "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Official Video)",
  "channel": "Rick Astley",
  "durationSeconds": 213,
  "viewCount": 1818130915,
  "language": "en",
  "isAutoGenerated": false,
  "availableLanguages": ["de", "en", "es", "fr", "pt"],
  "cueCount": 61,
  "characterCount": 2029,
  "transcript": "[♪♪♪] ♪ We're no strangers to love ♪ ♪ You know the rules and so do I ♪ ..."
}

What it is good for

• Feeding videos to an LLM — summaries, Q&A, retrieval over a channel
• Searching spoken content across many videos at once
• Repurposing long videos into articles, clips or show notes
• Research on how topics are actually talked about, at scale

Pricing

Pay per transcript delivered. Videos without captions cost nothing, duplicate URLs in the same run are charged once, and there is no start fee.

Proxy: residential is required

YouTube blocks datacenter IP ranges. Measured on the Apify platform with the same three videos:

Setup	Transcripts returned
Datacenter IP	0 of 3
Residential proxy	3 of 3

Datacenter requests come back with "Sign in to confirm you're not a bot". Residential proxy is therefore the default and should be left on. This is very likely why transcript scrapers in general have a reputation for failing.

Honest limits

• A video with no captions has no transcript. Nobody can extract one without running speech recognition, which this Actor does not do. You will get a row telling you so, free of charge
• Auto-generated captions carry the usual speech-recognition errors, especially on music and accents. isAutoGenerated tells you when you are looking at one
• Private, deleted and age-restricted videos cannot be read

FAQ

Do I need a YouTube API key? No. This does not use the YouTube Data API, so there is no quota to run out of.

Does it work on Shorts? Yes, and on /live/ and /embed/ URLs too.

Why did my video return an error row? Almost always because it has no captions at all. The row carries the reason and is never billed.

What if it breaks? This Actor depends on YouTube's internal client versions, which age out over time. Automated contract tests catch that. Report an issue and it gets fixed.