📝 YouTube Transcript Scraper: Subtitles, SRT and Metadata

Turn any public YouTube video with captions into clean, timestamped text. Paste a list of links, choose a language and a format, and get one result per video, ready for an LLM, a spreadsheet or a subtitle editor.

At a glance
Price	$1.00 per 1,000 transcripts, platform usage included
Charged when	A video returns a transcript. Everything else is free.
Formats	Timestamped segments (JSON), plain text, SRT, WebVTT
Language	Your choice, with a sensible fallback when a video lacks it
Links	Watch, Shorts, embed, mobile, youtu.be and bare video ids
Metadata	Channel, duration, upload date, views, chapters, tags: free on request
AI agents	Callable as a tool from Claude, Cursor and VS Code over MCP

🧾 What's in each result

• The transcript in the format you chose. As segments, each line carries text, start and duration in seconds.
• Which track you got: language, and isAsr for automatic captions.
• What you asked for, in preferred, so a fallback is easy to spot.
• Every real caption track the video has, in captionTracks.
• The video's metadata, when you turn it on: description, channel, duration, upload date, view count, thumbnails, chapters and tags.
• A reason code for every video that has no transcript, instead of a crashed run.

🧠 Who it's for

You are building	Set this
A summarizer, Q&A bot or RAG index	format: json, so every chunk keeps a timestamp that links back to the video
A prompt from one long video	format: text, one string to paste straight in
Subtitles for an editor or player	format: srt or vtt
A research dataset across channels	includeMetadata: true, then export to CSV or Excel
A blog post, newsletter or show notes	format: text, then hand it to your writing model
An agent that answers questions about videos	The MCP setup below

▶️ Run it in three steps

1. Paste YouTube links, or 11 character video ids, into YouTube video URLs.
2. Optionally set a Preferred language, such as en, de or pt-BR.
3. Press Start, then download the results as JSON, CSV or Excel.

⚙️ Input

Field	Type	Default	What it does
urls	list of strings, required		YouTube links or video ids. A link repeated in the list is dropped, so it is never charged twice in one run.
language	string	the video's own	Preferred language code. A preference, not a filter: see below.
preferAutomaticCaptions	boolean	false	Within each language, take automatic captions before the creator's own.
format	json, text, srt, vtt	json	Segments with timestamps, or the transcript as one string.
includeMetadata	boolean	false	Add the video's metadata to each result, at no extra charge.

How the language is chosen

A video always returns a transcript when it has any caption track at all. Tracks are tried in this order, creator captions before automatic ones within each step:

1. Your preferred language
2. The video's own language
3. English
4. The first track available

preferred echoes what you asked for and language says what you got, so filtering out an unwanted fallback is one comparison.

Recipes

A batch in mixed link formats

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

The third entry repeats the first and is dropped, so you get two results.

German subtitles as SRT

{
  "urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"],
  "language": "de",
  "format": "srt"
}

transcript holds the contents of the SRT file.

Plain text plus video details, for a research sheet

{
  "urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"],
  "format": "text",
  "includeMetadata": true
}

🗂️ Output

One item per URL. Here is a transcript with metadata on, shortened. With metadata off, the fields from description to extra are left out:

{
  "inputUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "site": "youtube",
  "id": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "title": "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Official Video) (4K Remaster)",
  "preferred": { "language": "en", "asr": false },
  "language": "en",
  "isAsr": false,
  "captionTracks": [
    { "language": "en", "asr": false, "name": "English" },
    { "language": "de-DE", "asr": false, "name": "German (Germany)" },
    { "language": "ja", "asr": false, "name": "Japanese" },
    { "language": "pt-BR", "asr": false, "name": "Portuguese (Brazil)" },
    { "language": "es-419", "asr": false, "name": "Spanish (Latin America)" },
    { "language": "en", "asr": true, "name": "English (auto-generated)" }
  ],
  "format": "json",
  "segmentCount": 61,
  "transcript": [
    { "text": "[♪♪♪]", "start": 1.36, "duration": 1.68 },
    { "text": "♪ We're no strangers to love ♪", "start": 18.64, "duration": 3.24 }
  ],
  "description": "The official video for “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley...",
  "uploader": {
    "id": "UCuAXFkgsw1L7xaCfnd5JJOw",
    "name": "Rick Astley",
    "url": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuAXFkgsw1L7xaCfnd5JJOw"
  },
  "durationSeconds": 213,
  "uploadDate": "2009-10-25",
  "viewCount": 1825911060,
  "isLive": false,
  "thumbnails": [
    { "url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi_webp/dQw4w9WgXcQ/maxresdefault.webp", "width": 1920, "height": 1080 }
  ],
  "chapters": [],
  "tags": ["rick astley", "Never Gonna Give You Up", "nggyu"],
  "extra": {
    "like_count": 19485690,
    "comment_count": 2400000,
    "categories": ["Music"],
    "age_limit": 0,
    "live_status": "not_live",
    "availability": "public",
    "language": "en"
  },
  "error": null
}

isAsr is true for automatic captions. In captionTracks the same flag is called asr.

When a video has no transcript

You still get an item, and it costs nothing:

{
  "inputUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...",
  "error": {
    "code": "NO_CAPTIONS",
    "message": "This media has no caption tracks.",
    "requestId": "..."
  }
}

Code	Meaning
NO_CAPTIONS	The video has no caption tracks at all.
UNAVAILABLE	Removed, private or region locked.
BLOCKED	YouTube refused the request, for example an age restricted video.
UPSTREAM_RATE_LIMITED	YouTube is throttling requests. Try again later.
EXTRACTION_FAILED	A temporary failure. Try again later.
UNSUPPORTED_SITE	Not a YouTube video URL.
INVALID_URL	Not a valid URL.
FREE_PLAN_LIMIT	Skipped: the Apify free plan's daily transcripts are used up.
CHARGE_LIMIT_REACHED	Skipped: the run reached the maximum charge you set.

None of these is charged.

🏷️ Pricing

One price, one event: $1.00 per 1,000 transcripts. You are charged once per video that returns a transcript, with or without metadata. A three hour lecture costs the same as a thirty second Short. Failed videos cost nothing, and platform usage is included.

Videos with a transcript	Cost
100	$0.10
1,000	$1.00
10,000	$10.00
100,000	$100.00

Set a maximum charge for a run and it stops before going over, listing the URLs it did not process.

On the Apify free plan, you get 30 transcripts per day, across all your runs. The count resets at 00:00 UTC. Once it is reached, the run stops and returns the remaining URLs with the FREE_PLAN_LIMIT code, free of charge, and the run's status message says so. Videos without a transcript do not count. Paid Apify plans have no limit.

🔌 Plug it into your AI agent

Through Apify's MCP server, this Actor becomes a tool your agent can call. Use this server URL, with your Apify API token:

https://mcp.apify.com?tools=fetchrail/youtube-transcript

Client	How to add it
Claude Code	claude mcp add --transport http apify "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=fetchrail/youtube-transcript" --header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN"
Claude Desktop, claude.ai	Add a custom connector with the URL above and sign in to Apify
Cursor	In .cursor/mcp.json, under mcpServers: the URL, plus an Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN header
VS Code	In .vscode/mcp.json, under servers: "type": "http", the URL and the same header

Then just ask, for example: "Summarize the transcript of this video and list the three main claims with their timestamps."

🧑‍💻 From code and automations

One HTTP request. Runs the Actor and returns the results. Replace YOUR_TOKEN with your Apify API token:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/fetchrail~youtube-transcript/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"], "format": "text"}'

Python, with apify-client version 3 or later:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("fetchrail/youtube-transcript").call(
    run_input={"urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"], "format": "text"}
)
for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item["title"], item.get("transcript") or item["error"])

No code. Apify's Make, n8n and Zapier integrations run the Actor and pass each result to your next step, such as a spreadsheet row or a Slack message. Schedules and webhooks are set up from Apify Console.

🙋 Questions people ask

Does it transcribe videos that have no captions? No. It returns the captions a video already has, from the creator or generated by YouTube, and does not run speech-to-text. A video with no caption track returns NO_CAPTIONS, free of charge.

Why not just use YouTube's own API? YouTube's Data API lists caption tracks, but downloading one requires signing in as the channel owner, so it only works on your own videos. This Actor works on any public video with captions.

Why did I get a different language than I asked for? The video has no track in that language, so the fallback order chose another. Compare language with preferred in the result.

Why are machine translations missing? YouTube can translate its automatic captions into many languages on demand, but those translations fail often and stack two layers of machine error. You get only the tracks that really exist, all listed in captionTracks. For another language, send the plain text to your LLM.

Can I pass a playlist or a channel? Not yet. Pass each video's URL or id.

Is this affiliated with YouTube? No. It is an independent tool that reads captions YouTube shows publicly to any viewer.

Is it legal? How you use transcripts is your responsibility: they can be protected by copyright, and spoken content can contain personal data. If in doubt, consult a lawyer.

🛟 Support

Open an issue on this Actor's Issues tab. If a video failed, include the requestId from its result, which lets us trace exactly what happened.