YouTube Transcript & Subtitles Scraper

What does YouTube Transcript Scraper do?

YouTube Transcript Scraper extracts the transcript (subtitles / captions) of any public YouTube video — creator-uploaded or auto-generated — in the language you want, optionally translated, as plain text and/or timestamped segments, together with the video title and channel.

Paste a list of video URLs and get clean text ready for AI summaries, RAG, content repurposing, SEO, research and accessibility.

Why use it?

• 🎯 Any public video with captions: regular videos, Shorts, live replays, embeds, youtu.be links.
• 🌍 Language control — choose preferred languages in order; if none exists you still get the first available transcript.
• 🔁 Translation — get the transcript translated by YouTube into another language (e.g. Spanish video → English text).
• 🧑‍🎤 Human subtitles first — prefers creator-uploaded subtitles and falls back to auto-generated ones.
• ⏱️ Text and timestamps — full text for LLMs plus segments with start time and duration for clips and chapters.
• 🛡️ Reliable — tries a direct connection first and switches to Apify Proxy only when YouTube blocks the request.
• 📋 Available languages of every video are listed, so you know what else you can request.

Use cases

• AI & LLM pipelines: summarize videos, build RAG knowledge bases, generate notes and quizzes.
• Content repurposing: turn videos into blog posts, newsletters, threads and show notes.
• Research & monitoring: analyze what creators, competitors or experts say across many videos.
• SEO & accessibility: create captions, chapters and searchable text.

How to use it

1. Paste video URLs or 11-character IDs in Videos (one per line).
2. Set Preferred languages (e.g. en, es) and, optionally, Translate to.
3. Choose the Output format: text, timestamped segments, or both.
4. Run it — one result per video.

Input example

{
  "videos": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk", "https://youtu.be/8jPQjjsBbIc"],
  "languages": ["en"],
  "translateTo": "",
  "preferManual": true,
  "outputFormat": "both"
}

Output example

{
  "video_id": "aircAruvnKk",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk",
  "title": "But what is a neural network? | Deep learning chapter 1",
  "channel": "3Blue1Brown",
  "channel_url": "https://www.youtube.com/@3blue1brown",
  "language": "English",
  "language_code": "en",
  "is_generated": false,
  "translated": false,
  "word_count": 3357,
  "duration_seconds": 1106,
  "transcript": "This is a 3. It's sloppily written and rendered at an extremely low resolution of 28x28 pixels…",
  "segments": [{"start": 4.22, "duration": 3.1, "text": "This is a 3."}],
  "available_languages": [{"language": "English", "language_code": "en", "is_generated": false, "translatable": true}],
  "scraped_at": "2026-11-10T04:10:00+00:00"
}

A SUMMARY record in the run's key-value store lists each video with its status (and the reason when a transcript is not available, e.g. captions disabled).

Pricing

You pay per transcript successfully extracted. Videos without captions, private or unavailable videos are not charged.

Is it legal?

The actor reads captions that are publicly available for public videos. Transcripts are the creators' content: make sure your use (e.g. republishing) respects copyright and YouTube's terms in your jurisdiction.

Feedback

Need playlists or whole channels, another field or format? Open an issue on the Issues tab — the actor is actively maintained.