# Youtube Transcript Scraper (`excellent_mustang/youtube-transcript-scraper`) Actor

- **URL**: https://apify.com/excellent\_mustang/youtube-transcript-scraper.md
- **Developed by:** [Gorav Agarwal](https://apify.com/excellent_mustang) (community)
- **Stats:** 2 total users, 1 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks
- **User rating**: No ratings yet

## Pricing

from $3.00 / 1,000 results

This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events.

Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/actors-in-store.md#pay-per-event

## What's an Apify Actor?

An Actor is a serverless cloud program that runs on the Apify platform. It has two run modes.
In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours,
and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store.
In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server.

Apify vocabulary and the platform model are defined once, in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md.

## How to integrate an Actor?

If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects.
You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready.

Do not guess an integration path. Every one of them is in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md: the Apify MCP server, Agent Skills with the Apify CLI, the JavaScript and Python clients, the REST API, and the account-free path for an agent with no human to sign in. It also carries the rule on stating cost before the first paid run.

For examples already wired to this Actor's own input schema, see the [API](#api) section below.

Each client library has reference documentation the quickstart does not restate: [JavaScript/TypeScript](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md) (`npm install apify-client`) and [Python](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md) (`pip install apify-client`).

# README

## Bulk YouTube Transcript Scraper

Extract transcripts and subtitles from **hundreds of YouTube videos in a single run** — by video URL, playlist, channel, @handle or search query. Returns timestamped segments, clean plain text, optional SRT, the full list of available caption languages, and a **per-video status code** so a partial failure is visible instead of silent.

**You are only charged for transcripts that are actually returned.** A video with no captions, a private video, or one YouTube refuses to serve costs you nothing.

### Why this one

Most YouTube transcript Actors take **one video per run**. If you have 500 videos, that is 500 runs to orchestrate, 500 sets of overhead, and no consolidated output. This one takes a list — or a whole channel — and gives you a single dataset.

The other common failure is silence. When YouTube declines a request, a naive scraper writes an empty string and moves on, so you discover months later that a chunk of your corpus is blank. Here every video carries an explicit status: `OK`, `NO_TRANSCRIPT`, `NO_MATCHING_LANGUAGE`, `VIDEO_UNAVAILABLE`, `AGE_RESTRICTED`, `LIVE_STREAM`, `EMPTY_TRANSCRIPT`, `IP_BLOCKED`, `FETCH_FAILED` or `INVALID_INPUT` — and failures are written to a separate `failures` dataset with a human-readable reason.

### Read this before you run it: YouTube blocks datacenter IPs

This is the single most important thing to understand, and most listings in this category do not tell you.

YouTube now answers transcript requests from cloud/datacenter IP ranges with **"Sign in to confirm you're not a bot"**. I measured this directly from two independent datacenter networks (Google Cloud and Cloudflare) against five different endpoints — watch page, mobile watch page, embed, `youtube-nocookie`, and the watch page with consent parameters. **Every one returned `LOGIN_REQUIRED` and zero caption tracks.** The same requests from a residential connection returned a full 28-language track list.

Apify runs on exactly those cloud ranges. So:

- **This Actor defaults to Apify Proxy with the `RESIDENTIAL` group.** Without it, expect most videos to come back `IP_BLOCKED`.
- **Residential proxy bandwidth is billed to your own Apify account**, separately from this Actor's per-result price.
- Measured consumption is **51.4 KB per video** on the wire. At Apify's residential rate of $8/GB that is **about $0.39 per 1,000 transcripts**.

So the honest all-in cost is roughly **$2.89–$3.39 per 1,000 transcripts**, of which ~$0.39 is proxy bandwidth on your account. I would rather you see that here than on your invoice.

If you already run your own residential or mobile proxy, point `proxyConfiguration` at it and the bandwidth cost disappears.

### How it works

1. **Expand** every input into video IDs. Playlists, channels, @handles and search queries are paged through YouTube's internal API.
2. **Resolve each video** through the InnerTube player endpoint using a mobile client context.
3. **Select the best caption track**: your preferred languages in order, human-written before auto-generated, with an optional fallback to any available language.
4. **Download and parse** the caption document into timestamped segments.
5. **Write** successes to the default dataset and failures to the `failures` dataset.

#### A technical note on why the mobile client matters

The traditional approach — scrape the watch page, read `captionTracks[].baseUrl`, fetch it — is broken in a way that is easy to miss. Those WEB-client caption URLs now return **HTTP 200 with a zero-length body** unless they carry a Proof-of-Origin token. It looks exactly like success and yields nothing, which is why so many transcript tools quietly started returning empty strings. This Actor uses the iOS and Android client contexts, whose caption URLs still return real content, and treats an empty document as an explicit `EMPTY_TRANSCRIPT` failure rather than a blank result.

It also handles both caption schemas YouTube serves — the legacy `<transcript><text start= dur=>` form used by older videos and the newer millisecond-based `timedtext format="3"` form — which is a common source of "works on some videos, not others".

### Input

| Field | Type | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| `videos` | array | 1 demo video | URLs, bare IDs, playlists, channels, @handles, or `search:your query` |
| `languages` | array | `["en"]` | Preferred language codes, in priority order |
| `preferManualCaptions` | boolean | `true` | Human-written before auto-generated |
| `allowAutoGenerated` | boolean | `true` | Accept ASR captions |
| `anyLanguageFallback` | boolean | `true` | Use any track if preferred languages are missing |
| `includeSegments` | boolean | `true` | Timestamped segment array |
| `includeTimestampedText` | boolean | `false` | `[mm:ss]`-prefixed single string |
| `includeSrt` | boolean | `false` | Ready-to-use `.srt` |
| `maxItems` | integer | `1000` | Total videos this run |
| `maxVideosPerSource` | integer | `200` | Cap per playlist/channel/search |

#### Example input

```json
{
  "videos": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk",
    "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_67000Dx_ZCJB-3pi",
    "@3blue1brown",
    "search:transformer architecture explained"
  ],
  "languages": ["en", "en-GB"],
  "maxVideosPerSource": 50,
  "includeSrt": true
}
```

### Output example

One item per successful transcript (text abbreviated here):

```json
{
  "position": 1,
  "videoId": "aircAruvnKk",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk",
  "status": "OK",
  "title": "But what is a neural network?",
  "channel": "3Blue1Brown",
  "channelId": "UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw",
  "durationSeconds": 1120,
  "viewCount": 19528431,
  "language": "en",
  "languageName": "English",
  "isAutoGenerated": false,
  "availableLanguages": [
    { "languageCode": "en", "languageName": "English", "isGenerated": false, "isTranslatable": true },
    { "languageCode": "de", "languageName": "German", "isGenerated": false, "isTranslatable": true }
  ],
  "segmentCount": 286,
  "characterCount": 18342,
  "wordCount": 3357,
  "text": "…full transcript as a single clean string…",
  "segments": [
    { "start": 4.2, "duration": 3.1, "end": 7.3, "text": "…" },
    { "start": 7.3, "duration": 2.8, "end": 10.1, "text": "…" }
  ],
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-21T09:14:02Z"
}
```

A failed video, written to the **`failures`** dataset and **not billed**:

```json
{
  "videoId": "XXXXXXXXXXX",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXXXXXXXXXX",
  "status": "NO_TRANSCRIPT",
  "error": "video has no caption tracks",
  "title": "Some video",
  "availableLanguages": [],
  "sourceInput": "@somechannel"
}
```

Each run also writes a `RUN_SUMMARY` record to the key-value store with the status breakdown, request count, bytes transferred and the estimated residential-proxy cost for that run.

### Pricing

**Pay per result, and only for a transcript actually returned.** Failures go to a separate dataset that is not billed.

| | |
|---|---|
| Actor price | **$3.00 per 1,000 transcripts** |
| Residential proxy bandwidth (your account) | ~$0.39 per 1,000 |
| **Realistic all-in** | **~$3.39 per 1,000** |

### Use cases

**Feeding LLMs and RAG pipelines.** Clean plain text plus timestamps is exactly the shape a chunker wants. Turn a 200-video channel into a searchable corpus in one run.

**Content repurposing.** Pull transcripts for a whole playlist and generate summaries, blog drafts, show notes or clip suggestions.

**Research and media analysis.** Quantitative study of what was said across a channel or topic over time, with timestamps for citation.

**Subtitle workflows.** Export SRT for videos where captions exist but the file was never published.

**Accessibility auditing.** The `availableLanguages` array plus `isAutoGenerated` shows which videos have real human captions and which rely on ASR.

### FAQ & Support

**Can it do a whole channel?** Yes. Pass the channel URL or `@handle` and it pages through the Videos tab, optionally including Shorts. Use `maxVideosPerSource` to cap it.

**Do I need a YouTube API key?** No. This uses no authentication, no cookies and no login. It also does not touch the official Data API, so it does not consume your quota.

**Why did I get `IP_BLOCKED`?** YouTube refused the request because it came from a datacenter IP. Enable Apify Proxy with the `RESIDENTIAL` group — that is the default, so this usually means it was switched off.

**Why `EMPTY_TRANSCRIPT`?** YouTube returned a caption document with no cues. This is normally a Proof-of-Origin rejection. Retrying through a residential proxy usually resolves it. It is reported rather than silently returned as empty text.

**Can I get auto-generated captions only, or human-written only?** Yes — `preferManualCaptions` and `allowAutoGenerated` control this independently.

**What about videos with no captions at all?** They return `NO_TRANSCRIPT` in the failures dataset and cost you nothing. No scraper can generate captions that YouTube does not have; anything claiming otherwise is transcribing the audio, which is a different and far more expensive job.

**How fast is it?** Around 5 videos in parallel by default. Concurrency is deliberately conservative because YouTube rate-limits aggressively and a throttled run is worse than a slightly slower one. Raise `maxConcurrency` if your proxy pool can take it.

**Is this legal?** It reads publicly available caption tracks from public videos — no login, no DRM circumvention, no personal data. Transcripts are the copyrighted work of their creators; you are responsible for how you use them, and fair-use limits apply to reproduction.

**Something looks wrong.** Open an issue on the Issues tab with your input JSON and the run ID. Include the `RUN_SUMMARY` record if you can — it contains the status breakdown that usually identifies the cause immediately.

# Actor input Schema

## `videos` (type: `array`):

One entry per source. Accepts video URLs (watch, youtu.be, /shorts/, /embed/, /live/), bare 11-character video IDs, playlist URLs or IDs, channel URLs, @handles, and search queries written as "search:your query". Playlists, channels and searches are expanded into their videos automatically.

## `languages` (type: `array`):

Language codes in priority order, e.g. en, en-GB, es, de. The first available match wins. Use the fallback option below to decide what happens when none of them exist.

## `preferManualCaptions` (type: `boolean`):

When a language has both a human-written and an auto-generated track, take the human-written one. It is markedly more accurate, especially for punctuation and proper nouns.

## `allowAutoGenerated` (type: `boolean`):

Fall back to YouTube's automatic speech recognition when no human-written track exists. Turn this off to accept only human-written captions.

## `anyLanguageFallback` (type: `boolean`):

If none of your preferred languages exist, return whatever track the video does have rather than reporting a failure.

## `includeSegments` (type: `boolean`):

Add the segments array, each entry carrying start, duration, end and text. Turn off for a smaller dataset when you only need the plain text.

## `includeTimestampedText` (type: `boolean`):

Add a single string with a \[mm:ss] marker before each line. Convenient for pasting into an LLM prompt.

## `includeSrt` (type: `boolean`):

Add a ready-to-use .srt subtitle string.

## `maxItems` (type: `integer`):

Total number of videos to process in this run.

## `maxVideosPerSource` (type: `integer`):

Cap how many videos are taken from any single playlist, channel or search query, so one large channel cannot consume the whole run.

## `includeShorts` (type: `boolean`):

Also pull a channel's Shorts tab, not just its long-form Videos tab.

## `maxConcurrency` (type: `integer`):

Parallel video requests. The default of 5 is deliberately conservative: YouTube rate-limits aggressively, and a slower run that succeeds beats a fast one that gets throttled.

## `proxyConfiguration` (type: `object`):

Defaults to Apify Proxy with the RESIDENTIAL group, because YouTube returns 'Sign in to confirm you're not a bot' to the datacenter IPs that Apify runs on. Residential bandwidth is billed to your Apify account (about $8/GB; this Actor uses roughly 40 KB per video, so about $0.30 per 1,000 videos). You can switch to datacenter proxy or no proxy, but expect most videos to come back with status IP\_BLOCKED.

## Actor input object example

```json
{
  "videos": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw",
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk"
  ],
  "languages": [
    "en"
  ],
  "preferManualCaptions": true,
  "allowAutoGenerated": true,
  "anyLanguageFallback": true,
  "includeSegments": true,
  "includeTimestampedText": false,
  "includeSrt": false,
  "maxItems": 1000,
  "maxVideosPerSource": 200,
  "includeShorts": false,
  "maxConcurrency": 5,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": [
      "RESIDENTIAL"
    ]
  }
}
```

# Actor output Schema

## `transcripts` (type: `string`):

Every successfully extracted transcript, one item per video.

## `transcriptsOverview` (type: `string`):

Video, channel, language and word count without the full segment arrays.

## `failures` (type: `string`):

Per-video status code and reason for every video that produced no transcript.

## `runSummary` (type: `string`):

Status breakdown, bandwidth used and estimated residential-proxy cost for this run.

# API

You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup.

## JavaScript example

```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

// Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
// Replace the '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token
const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>',
});

// Prepare Actor input
const input = {
    "videos": [
        "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw",
        "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk"
    ],
    "maxItems": 1000
};

// Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
const run = await client.actor("excellent_mustang/youtube-transcript-scraper").call(input);

// Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any)
console.log('Results from dataset');
console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
items.forEach((item) => {
    console.dir(item);
});

// 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs

```

## Python example

```python
from apify_client import ApifyClient

# Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
# Replace '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token.
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

# Prepare the Actor input
run_input = {
    "videos": [
        "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw",
        "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk",
    ],
    "maxItems": 1000,
}

# Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
run = client.actor("excellent_mustang/youtube-transcript-scraper").call(run_input=run_input)

# Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any)
print(f"💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/{run.default_dataset_id}")
for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item)

# 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start

```

## CLI example

```bash
echo '{
  "videos": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw",
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk"
  ],
  "maxItems": 1000
}' |
apify call excellent_mustang/youtube-transcript-scraper --silent --output-dataset

```

## MCP server setup

```json
{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apify": {
            "type": "http",
            "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,excellent_mustang/youtube-transcript-scraper"
        }
    }
}
```

The hosted server signs you in with OAuth on first connect, so no API token belongs in this config. Clients without OAuth support can send an `Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_API_TOKEN>` header instead, using a token from API & Integrations in Apify Console (https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations).

## OpenAPI specification

Download the OpenAPI definition: https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/GFckydCAUUFd0lghP/builds/Psi4urtSl2weUX2pC/openapi.json