Video to Text: TikTok, Instagram Reels & MP4 Transcriber

What does Video to Text Transcriber do?

Video to Text Transcriber converts video to text: it transcribes TikTok videos, Instagram Reels, X (Twitter) and Facebook videos and MP4, MOV, WEBM, MKV, AVI files into a full transcript, timestamped segments, Markdown with timestamps and readable SRT/VTT subtitles (42 characters per line, 2 lines, ready to upload), in 99 languages, and can translate the speech to English. Paste a TikTok, Instagram, X or Facebook link, a direct link to a file, or a Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive share link; audio files work too.

It runs open-source Whisper on Apify, so there is no OpenAI key and no subscription. You pay per minute of video, and failed files or videos without speech are never billed.

It runs on the Apify platform, so you also get an API, scheduling, integrations (Make, Zapier, n8n, Google Drive, Notion) and access for AI agents through the Apify MCP server.

Independent tool, not affiliated with or endorsed by the platforms it reads. TikTok, Instagram, X and Facebook are trademarks of their respective owners; they are named only to describe the public data this Actor collects. It only accesses publicly available content.

Why use it?

• 📱 TikTok and Instagram Reels: the spoken words of any public video, with its title, author, date, views and likes. Study hooks and scripts of viral videos, or repurpose your own.
• 🎓 Courses, webinars and lectures: searchable text and notes from every recording.
• 🎥 Content repurposing: turn videos into blog posts, newsletters, show notes and social posts.
• 🧑‍💼 Meetings and interviews: transcripts of Zoom, Teams or Meet recordings, with an optional AI summary, chapters and action items (Claude, with your own Anthropic key).
• 🔎 Research and compliance: make video archives searchable.
• 🤖 RAG and AI assistants: timestamped text chunks ready for a vector database.

How to convert video to text

1. Click Try for free.
2. Paste links to TikTok videos, Instagram Reels or video files (or Google Drive / Dropbox share links).
3. Choose the spoken language (or auto) and what to return: text, SRT subtitles, Markdown with timestamps…
4. Click Start. With the default model, transcription runs several times faster than real time.
5. Download the transcript as JSON, CSV or Excel, or the .txt / .srt files from the links in the results.

Input

Field	Description	Default
sources	TikTok / Instagram links, video (or audio) URLs and share links	required (or profiles / base64Files)
profiles	TikTok accounts (@username or profile link): transcribe their newest videos	-
maxVideosPerProfile	Newest videos per TikTok account	10
onlyNewVideos	Skip TikTok videos transcribed by earlier runs	on
language	Spoken language code, or auto	auto
task	transcribe or translate (to English)	transcribe
model	base (recommended), small (most accurate) or tiny	base
outputs	text, markdown, segments, srt, vtt, chunks	text, srt
subtitleMaxChars	Characters per subtitle line (0 = raw Whisper segments)	42
vocabulary	Names and jargon to spell correctly	-
aiInsights + anthropicApiKey	AI summary, chapters and action items	off
maxDurationMinutes	Transcribe (and bill) at most N minutes per file	240

{
  "sources": [{ "url": "https://example.com/webinar.mp4" }],
  "outputs": ["text", "markdown", "srt"]
}

Output

One record per video. You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel.

{
  "source": "https://example.com/webinar.mp4",
  "status": "ok",
  "language": "en",
  "durationSeconds": 310.6,
  "transcribedSeconds": 60,
  "billedMinutes": 1,
  "text": "My fellow Americans, Prime Minister Nakasoni of Japan, will be visiting me here at the White House next week. …",
  "srt": "1\n00:00:07,500 --> 00:00:11,840\nMy fellow Americans, Prime Minister\nNakasoni of Japan, will be visiting me\n…",
  "stats": { "words": 140, "speedFactor": 15.2 }
}

TikTok, Instagram, X and Facebook video to text

Paste the link of a public TikTok video, Instagram Reel / video post, X (Twitter) post with a video or Facebook video / Reel. The Actor downloads only the audio track, transcribes it with Whisper and adds the video details:

{
  "source": "https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0hQSaMpD97/",
  "status": "ok",
  "language": "en",
  "durationSeconds": 60.02,
  "billedMinutes": 1,
  "text": "Hey Space Nerds, I got a special delivery for you. So picture this. You're on a military range in the middle of the Utah desert. …",
  "video": {
    "platform": "instagram",
    "author": "NASA Goddard",
    "uploadDate": "2023-12-06",
    "likes": 8391,
    "comments": 17
  }
}

Transcribe a whole TikTok account

Put accounts in TikTok accounts (profiles) instead of pasting links one by one. The Actor lists the newest videos of each account and transcribes them, one row per video with its date, views and likes:

{
  "profiles": ["@nasa"],
  "maxVideosPerProfile": 10,
  "onlyNewVideos": true
}

Schedule it weekly: with onlyNewVideos (on by default) videos transcribed in earlier runs are skipped, so you only pay for new ones. Videos with only music are marked as having no speech and are not billed. Instagram accounts cannot be listed without a login, so for Instagram paste the Reel links.

A typical 15 to 60-second video costs $0.006 (one minute). Private videos, videos that need a login and videos that cannot be downloaded are not billed; the result explains why. YouTube is not supported here: use YouTube Transcript Scraper.

How much does video transcription cost?

Event	Price
Run start (per GB of memory, default 4 GB)	$0.0005
Minute of video, base or tiny model	$0.006 ($0.36 per hour)
Minute of video, small model	$0.012 ($0.72 per hour)
AI insights per video (optional; Claude usage billed to your own key)	$0.01

A 1-hour webinar costs about $0.36 with the base model. Failed files and videos without speech are free.

How accurate is it? Whisper tiny vs base vs small

We measured the three models ourselves, with the same code this Actor runs:

Model	Word error rate (lower is better)	Speed on Apify (default 4 GB)	Price per minute
tiny	11.3%	about 20–30× faster than real time	$0.006
base (default)	8.2%	about 11× faster than real time	$0.006
small	5.4%	about 4× faster than real time	$0.012

Word error rate was measured on 73 clean English recordings from the LibriSpeech test set (8.6 minutes of audio). Speed was measured on a 2.6-minute speech recording in Apify runs (tiny: scheduled test runs). Accents, background noise and other languages give higher error rates, so choose small for those. A 60-minute video takes about 5–6 minutes with base and about 15 minutes with small.

Use it with AI agents (MCP)

Add https://mcp.apify.com?tools=fguiraud/video-to-text-transcriber to Claude, Cursor or any MCP client and ask: "Transcribe this webinar and give me the key takeaways: https://…/webinar.mp4".

Related tools

• Need subtitles with proper line lengths for publishing? SRT Subtitle Generator.
• YouTube videos? YouTube Transcript Scraper returns existing captions in seconds.
• Podcasts by name or RSS feed: Podcast Transcript Scraper.

FAQ and limitations

• Which links work? TikTok, Instagram, X (Twitter), Facebook, direct file links and cloud-drive share links. Other video platforms (YouTube, Vimeo) are not downloaded; use the YouTube tool above for YouTube.
• Who is speaking? Speaker labels are not included yet.
• Long files: up to 240 minutes per file by default; set maxDurationMinutes to cap cost.
• Found a problem or need a feature? Open an issue on the Issues tab. Replies within 48 hours. If the Actor saved you time, a quick review helps others find it.