Facebook Reels & Video Metadata / Transcript Extractor

Extract Facebook reels and videos with their play counts, engagement, duration, audio track, direct MP4 URLs and spoken-word transcripts.

Read a page's whole reels or videos tab, or pass individual reel / watch / video URLs. No login, no cookies to paste, no proxy required.

The transcripts are real

Facebook publishes a SubRip caption file for many reels. This actor finds the .srt link in the payload, downloads it, and parses it into plain text plus timed cues:

You think you know Domino's but when it's mission critical, it's not the pizza we send in. Operation Loaded Chicken is a go. Crispy Bacon and Tomato, team leader…

A live check on one page's reels tab found captions on 4 of 10 reels and transcribed them. Videos with no captions get transcript: null — this actor does not run speech recognition of its own and does not pretend to.

What you get

Field	Example
videoId, permalinkUrl, isReel	637979908801309, facebook.com/reel/…, true
pageName, pageId	Domino's Pizza
caption, title	the post text and video title
playCount, playCountLabel	292000, 292K
reactionCount, commentCount, shareCount
engagementTotal, engagementRatePercent	442, 0.151
lengthSeconds, width, height	39.25, 1080, 1920
trackTitle, isOriginalAudio	audio track behind the reel
videoHdUrl, videoSdUrl, thumbnailUrl	direct downloads
captionsUrl, captionLocales, transcript
createdAtIso	2025-01-27T…

Two tabs, two kinds of play count

Tab	Play count
/reels/	abbreviated — Facebook publishes "292K", parsed to 292000
/videos	exact integers — 270777, 390753, 292030

Both numbers are given: playCount (parsed) and playCountLabel (exactly what Facebook rendered), so an approximation is never mistaken for an exact figure. Read both tabs to get the widest coverage.

Input example

{
  "pages": ["dominos"],
  "tabs": ["reels", "videos"],
  "maxVideosPerTab": 30,
  "fetchTranscripts": true,
  "onlyWithCaptions": true,
  "exportFormats": ["csv"]
}

Or for specific videos:

{
  "videoUrls": [
    "https://www.facebook.com/reel/637979908801309",
    "https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10153231379946729",
    "1053159700187202"
  ]
}

The watch URL is used as the resolver, so you never need to know whether an id is a reel or a page video.

Running it on Apify: use a residential proxy for pagination

Facebook serves the rendered first page to any IP, including Apify's. But the first pagination request from a datacenter IP comes back with Rate limit exceeded, so a platform run with no proxy stops at the videos Facebook renders in the tab.

The rate limit is on Facebook's GraphQL endpoint, which every actor in this family uses for its second page onwards. It was measured on 2026-09-20 with the Ad Library actor, three runs of the same search within a minute:

Run	Result
Apify, no proxy	30 results, 1 page — log: Rate limit exceeded
Apify, RESIDENTIAL proxy	60 results, 4 pages
Local machine, no proxy	70 results, 5 pages

So: switch the Apify proxy on and pick the RESIDENTIAL group whenever you want more than the first page. Running from your own machine needs no proxy at all.

The actor logs a warning naming the rate limit when it hits one, so a short run is never silently mistaken for a short result set.

Notes

• engagementRatePercent is engagement over plays, and is null when the play count is unknown or zero. A fabricated denominator would turn an unknown into a confident wrong number.
• videoHdUrl, videoSdUrl, thumbnailUrl and captionsUrl are signed CDN links and expire. Download what you need during or shortly after the run.
• Reels tabs are large — about 13 MB each — which is why maxVideosPerTab defaults to 20.
• A page with no reels tab, or a video restricted to signed-in viewers, produces an ERROR row saying so rather than a silent empty result.